


Bubblegum Breakdown: Song of Silverhand

by STMPD



Series: Bubblegum Crucible [4]
Category: Bubblegum Crisis, Cyberpunk 2020 - Fandom, Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Cyberpunk, Explosions, Lasers, Mecha, Railguns, Robots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:47:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23331148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/STMPD/pseuds/STMPD
Summary: Four months after Nemesis tore Megatokyo apart in his crusade against organized crime, the Knight Sabers have been picking up the pieces of their silent battle against GENOM. It hasn't been easy - the AD Police are now firmly in the megacorporation's pocket, just one more blunt instrument so the world's foremost economic power might consolidate its power in its home city.But when an old mentor of Sylia's shows up on her doorstep with corporate goons chasing her, and Priss gets a chip containing the digital ghost of a long-dead rockstar in her head, things get even more complicated. Now the Sabers might have a chance to bring down GENOM once and for all - provided that some other megacorporation doesn't get their hands on the ultimate prize first.The Sabers must now quest across the ruins of America, hunting for the fragments of a genius AI hacker. It isn't easy - they're far from home, in a land where the line between man and machine, good and evil has been blurry for decades.And when an enemy from deep in Sylia's past makes their move, things get even more dangerous - both for the Sabers and for the fate of humanity itself...
Series: Bubblegum Crucible [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1032323





	1. Previously on...

**Author's Note:**

> Bubblegum Crisis is, as of this time of writing, the property of the AIC Rights holding company.
> 
> Cyberpunk 2020 / 2077 is the joint property of R. Talsorian Games and CD Projekt Red.
> 
> Obviously, I own nothing, not even the original characters I've cooked up for this fanfic. If you seriously think suing my white ass is going to get you anything, then you probably are the type who couldn't pass a Voight-Kampf test and who maims small animals for fun.

**Cyberpunk 2020: Firestorm**

Once upon a time, in a future-present that never was, there were two megacorporations: Militech and Arasaka.

Militech was the world’s largest arms manufacturer, Eisenhower’s ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ privatized and grown teeth in the wake of the US government’s collapse around the turn of the millennium. They built everything from tanks to power armor to peashooters, sold their instruments of death to anyone with a pulse and the cash to pay upfront. They dreamed of ruling the world.

Arasaka was a Japanese _zaibatsu_ par excellence, mostly a private security firm but also a corporation with its fingers in every major industrial pie. Its founder, a WW2 veteran, had sworn vengeance on the heathen Americans, that his vision of Japan might rise again and rule the world.

Needless to say, these two corporations, and their respective chairmen, loathed each other. They warred against each other much as the US and the USSR, the superpowers of the last century, had in their so-called Cold War. The other corporate powers of the world tried to stay out of their way - the three corpwars that had already taken place were incredibly destructive, and no one wanted another one except for Arasaka and Militech.

Then came the Ocean War.

After the bankruptcy of IHAG, a venerable corporation dedicated primarily to the booming oceanic colonization market, its two former rivals, CINO and OTEC, began snapping at each other, hoping to seize as many assets as possible from the sunken corporation to gain an edge over their rival. This meant covert acts of violence of the kind so common in the corporate field of the early 2020’s, something neither corporation had too much experience in. To keep their stuff safe, and to make their rival’s stuff less safe, they turned to the world’s two great military companies - CINO hired Militech, and OTEC hired Arasaka.

You can probably guess where things went after that.

Suffice to say, by the early months of 2022, Militech and Arasaka were engaged in full-on megacorporate warfare of the most destructive kind. The war lasted only a few months before the Japanese, American, and European governments interfered to nationalize the assets of the two corps en masse, effectively destroying both companies with a few strokes of a pen; it was still enough to wipe out nearly 40% of global GDP.

This was where the storyline of seminal tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020 ended; hundreds of thousands dead, trillions in assets destroyed, and the corporate hegemony of the Pacific Rim seriously shaken. Flash forward nearly fifteen years and you have-

**Bubblegum Crisis:**

The year is 2036.

It is the future, but not quite as we know it. Japan is still a techno-economic superpower, China is basically an oversized North Korea, the EU and Russia are part of the same Eurobloc, the US has been kicked out of NATO over the Russian thing. But so many things are familiar to us in 2020. The networked technology which connects us. The endless minor wars divide which us.

The megacorporations which rule us.

Eleven years ago, the Second Great Kanto Quake struck the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area. A 9.5 with its epicenter in the heart of the city, it leveled the megapolis, killed hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The economic crash which followed the world’s largest and richest city’s collapse killed even more. The world’s pundits prophesized that this was it for Japan, that no nation could withstand such a disaster, and for a brief few months looked to America as a pillar of stability again.

They predicted wrong.

Tokyo did rise again - bigger and stranger than ever before, in a timeframe measured not in years, but in _months_.

But it was not the government who restored Tokyo, who engineered the Megatokyo Miracle. It was a corporation.

General Nippon Organic Manufacturing - GENOM for short - had once been a puny mid-sized corp competing for the scraps left behind by the big _keiretsus_ , the Mitsubishis and the Sonys and the Toshibas of the world. But those corps were gone now, their assets and headquarters destroyed in the quake, and GENOM rose to take their place with the help of an invention so important that those same pundits compared its impact on human civilization to the steam engine.

BioMechanical Analogues, known colloquially as Boomers. Living machines formed out of nanotech ‘cells’, grown into forms that not only met, but exceeded the capabilities of carbohydrate-based life. Boomers, working without rest or pay, rebuilt Megatokyo. Boomers, replacing billions of jobs, automated away nearly three-quarters of the global labor force. Boomers, to put it bluntly, made GENOM a new superpower, even if from time to time Boomers went ‘rampant’ and took innocent lives in their madness. Advanced Police forces were formed, but kept underfunded and chained to the corporate yoke. And no one dared to lift a finger, out of fear that this new superpower would destroy them, too.

No one, that is, except one woman: Sylia Stingray.

Her father was one of the geniuses behind Boomer technology, betrayed by GENOM, murdered when his purpose had been served. She was his revenge, her intellect enhanced by a mysterious datatape which rewired her brain, her hatred honed to a razor’s edge. Inspired by the super sentai shows of her childhood, equipped with prototype ‘hardsuits’ capable of taking on even the mightiest of Boomers, she put together a team to combat the megacorporation and its abuses:

  * Priss Asagiri, a wannabe rockstar and ex-gangster, whose heart burns with a need for revenge the way a star needs hydrogen.
  * Linna Yamazaki, a yuppie aerobics instructor with a near-superhuman talent for martial arts.
  * Nene Romanova, Russian immigrant, ADP mole, adorable teenager, master hacker.



They call themselves the Knight Sabers, and even in a city as big as Megatokyo, they are a force to be reckoned with.

It’s been almost five years to the day since the Knight Sabers’ founding. During that time, they’ve killed GENOM’s head of Internal Security, stopped a sentient racecar, squared off with a vampire Boomer, killed GENOM’s head of Internal Security two more times (it’s complicated), and generally caused GENOM no small amount of trouble. But - But! - they have not defeated GENOM. Sylia has accepted, in part, that it may not be possible to destroy such a superpower.

But times change, technology accelerates, everything becomes more unpredictable, and the Knight Sabers, once the conquering heroes, find themselves ever more immersed in a society blindly trundling towards its own suicide.

**This** is the story of four remarkable women, at the edge of the end of history, at the periphery of Kurzweil’s Singularity, fighting for what they believe, in true rock n’ roll superheroic fashion.

**This** is the Story of the Knight Sabers.

**This** is Bubblegum Crisis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. That's all the explanation for CP2020 and BGC done. Damn that took a long-ass time.
> 
> Yeah, yeah, I know, I haven't finished my continuation of Vigilante's Run yet, and yet here I am, writing its sequel! What in Sam Hill is going on here, you ask? Well, you deserve an explanation. Allow me.
> 
> First off, for those few who have read my other work, rest assured that I'm still continuing Vigilante's Run, still working on it steadily. I haven't finished it, and I fear I may be a way off from doing that. I just had this really nifty idea for a sequel, and thought I'd put it out there in hopes of attracting a little bit of attention - at least more than Vigilante's Run is currently getting.
> 
> Second, for those of you who found this through the CP2077 heading and are confused as to how I'm writing this fanfic before the game has actually come out, I must confess that I am playing something of a cruel trick on you. For you see, before Cyberpunk 2077 was the most hyped game of 2020, it was the roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020 in the 90's. And, while an American RPG and a Japanese anime may appear to have nothing to do with each other, the fact is that, give or take a decade of stuff happening, the general universes of the two franchises line up eerily well. I'm deadly certain that Mike Pondsmith was watching BGC before it was cool - hell, RTal Games even published a Bubblegum Crisis RPG and two supplements! So while this story has nothing to do with the plot of CP2077, it has everything to do with its predecessor setting. Think of it as an alternate timeline, a divergence from what now appears to be Cyberpunk's post-2020 continuity.
> 
> Hence this crossover, a mixup of BGC characters and CP2020 ones in the sort of mishmash only fanfiction can pull off. Cynical publicity whore that I am, I'm hoping that this will get a bit more exposure than Vigilante's Run's continuation, and hence more feedback. It's also designed to be a little easier to read, too. Shorter chapters, not the 10K-word whoppers I keep dropping. Not necessarily updated as frequently - VR is still the primary focus of my writing, and even it has to take a back seat to college when that starts up again - but it'll be there for people to skim over and gawk at.
> 
> So... yeah. Enjoy.


	2. Prologue: Endings - Opening Credits

**Arasaka Tower, Night City**

**December 11th, 2022**

**12:41 am**

This is how it starts.

Not with a whimper, but with a bang.

The Arasaka Towers are black blades against the California sky. They have stood, indomitable, for nearly a decade now. They remind the city who rules it. Not the NorCal government, not the mob. Arasaka rules.

Until now.

It starts with a deep, low rumbling, a sound that you don’t hear so much as you feel buzzing in your inner ear, your diaphragm. Then it escalates to a grinding roar as the nuke’s shockwave blasts through the landfill most of the city is built on top of. Support pillars sunk deep into Del Coronado Bay are shattered; earth thought unmoveable goes liquid, sloshes around like jello; any structure not reinforced, not too big to fail, falls flat.

Then the Towers fall.

They lurch, as if kicked from below. Then the North Tower collapses, crumpling in on itself like the aborted origami of an absentminded god, before collapsing into a mass of debris that smashes through the north side of the city with the force of a meteor. For a fraction of an attosecond, the East tower teeters, balanced on some impossible combination of mass, velocity, acceleration, before toppling over, obliterating the Corporate Center in an instant.

The mini-quake levels most of downtown, kicks ash and dust up into a black cloud over the city. Those who survived the initial shockwave and levelling suffocate. The fires the bomb starts will not be put out for another three months.

Night City is dead. Long Live Night City.

* * *

**Pacific Ocean, 853 km west of Honolulu**

**December 11th, 2022**

**10:35 pm**

Kei Arasaka awakes with a start. The _Sea Viper’_ s engines are off. _Very strange,_ he thinks. _I gave no orders to stop_. Have they arrived at the submarine rendezvous so soon?

“Takashi? Noriko?”

No response. He slides his hand into the secret panel in the bulkhead above and withdraws his pistol and _wakizashi_.

As he opens the door, Kei notices his guards, slumped in the alcove. He checks their pulses; alive, but unconscious. No sign of a struggle. A smell of ozone. Some kind of taser or EMP?

Kei makes his way through the ship, checking for someone, anyone, or some cause of the intrusion. Even Tai-sa Ogawa, the converted Samson, is down, covered in plascrete, his electronic systems garbled. Everyone else is missing or slumped at their station; there isn’t even a sign of a fight.

He comes to the forecastle. Stops. There are lights in the special room used for the tea ceremony.

He draws his pistol from his sash.

The door slides open. Inside, soft lights cast an amber glow over a low table, on which are set a massive handgun, some kind of computer equipment, and a dozen caseless rounds. On the far side is a young, somewhat pretty woman, sitting _seiza_ , dressed in a kimono. Her face seems unaccustomed to the grim look on it. He flips through his memories and makes an association. His pistol comes up.

“Spider Murphy. An unexpected pleasure. You are, however, uninvited.”

“I invited myself. Your guards didn’t seem to mind.”

“I do. And I believe I have the power to enforce my will.” He waves his gun.

“You need bullets to use that, if I remember correctly. But I could be wrong. After all, I’m just a datathief.” Her lips form a smirk.

Kei, shocked, stares in disbelief at the rounds on the table. Dumbfounded, he pops the magazine of his handgun to find it empty. He draws his _wakizashi_.

Spider is nonplussed. “Mine, of course, is loaded. Your people are fine; some will require medical attention. It’s amazing what you can do with less-than-lethal technology these days… and a few talented friends.” Kei sees two figures step out from behind a painted screen: One an Alpha-Borg he does not recognize, the other a woman whose demeanor says _solo_. While they do not brandish their weapons, their presence ends his plan to rush the girl.

“So now what?”

“Now,” Spider says as she picks a bottle up from behind her, “you are going to share some sake with me, and then I am going to plug you into this little box. When I do, a Soulkiller system will wipe your mind, and place it in a prison Rache set up a long time ago. It was intended for your father, but I don’t think Rache would disapprove of your occupancy.”

“I see. And if I choose not to?”

“You have no choice. You have lost everything your father built. Your nation has turned its back on you. You have dishonored yourself and your family. It has all turned to Ash, Kei. You must make amends.”

Spider pours the sake with a steady hand. She passes a cup over to Kei, who takes it with a steady hand. They drink.

He nods to the computer link, and the cable that is coiled next to it.

“You would have me execute myself?”

“I could force you, but I have no wish to. It is inevitable. It is the only honorable thing for you to do. Think of it as _seppuku_ . You are _samurai_ , are you not?”

Her words are honed blades slicing away the shield he had built in his mind: His attempt to deny his failure, the utter totality of his clan’s collapse, his part in it all of it as first son. As ruthless as he is, he _is_ still samurai.

“You are not my first choice of a _kaishakunin_ , but…” he says. Spider nods.

He nods back, and solemnly jacks in.

As the Soulkiller rushes upon him, he speaks through the interface:

_“The ocean waves swell_

_Stare into Death’s eyes, laughing_

_The seagulls cry above”_

Spider watches as the twitching subsides, then ceases.

Five long minutes later, she kneels by him, checking the pulse of her victim. She shakes her head and mentally sends a flurry of commands. The interlink on the table begins to smoke, as the last Soulkiller system dies thousands of miles away in a fiery blast.

She stands, walks out on the deck, Rogue and Shaitan beside her, and stares out into the night sky. Far away, a satellite traces a silent course around the earth.

Spider finally speaks, “Sleep well, Johnny. Morgan… Rache.” Her voice breaks. A long moment passes. Finally, she can bring herself to speak again.

“Rogue, call for pick-up, will you?” she says quietly, all emotion seared out of her.

She feels clean

She feels empty.

She feels dead.

“I need to go home.” 

_**Two days later, the end of the world begins.** _

* * *

**STMPD Fictitious Productions Presents**

**In Association With**

**AIC Rights**

**R. Talsorian Games**

**and**

**CD Projekt Red**

**_BUBBLEGUM CRUCIBLE 2036: SONG OF SILVERHAND_ **

**Starring**

**Kinuko Oomori**

**Keanu Reeves**

**Yoshiko Sakakibara**

**Michie Tomizawa**

**Akiko Hiramitsu**

**Christina Hendricks**

**Nolan North**

**(Old) Peter Weller**

**David Hayter**

**And Many Others To Be Filled In At The Author’s Deciding**

**Written and Directed by STMPD**

**Special Effects & Cinematography by Your Brain On Retro Anime**

**Bubblegum Crisis created by Toshimichi Suzuki**

**Bubblegum Crucible, Greg Mallory, and MALCORP created by Craig A. Reed Jr.**

**Cyberpunk 2020 created by Mike Pondsmith, Will Moss, and Derek Quinatar**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, silly opening credits aside (an old tradition from early-90's anime fanfiction like Undocumented Features), the middle chunk of this chapter, the stuff with Kei and Spider, is lifted verbatim from RTG's last CP2020 book, Firestorm: Shockwave. Just - gotta cite your sources, just to make sure.


	3. Chapter 1: No Peace For The Good

**Megatokyo**

**11:06 pm**

**June 13th, 2036**

**14 Years, And One Quake, Later**

This is how it begins.

There has never been a city like Megatokyo in the history of the world. Perhaps there never will be again.

Forty-four million people stacked and packed into a few dozen square kilometers, shoulder to shoulder; in the bad parts of town, they live in cages in what used to be studio apartments, split over and over again. A tax base of nearly two trillion credit; everyone who is someone has a role to play here, where every stream of wealth converges, a whirlpool of money. Technology that, at the turn of the century, would have been dismissed as the ravings of madmen; biomechanical robots, computers that think, weapons circling miles overhead that can level cities within seconds. Power, the power to remake the world in its image; it was GENOM’s first Technologically Integrated City, and it will not be the last.

Above it all, a tower, a ziggurat of chromatic glass and nanocomposite cermet. Below it all, a Fault, a yawning gap in the earth where evil seeps out of the rocks, drowning anyone stupid enough to live there in visions of apocalypse. Between the Tower and the Fault, a dozen different kinds of city forced to live together and share food, water, gas, life, death. Madness, yes, but what else would you expect in a world where flesh and souls are just new commodities?

At the peak of the tower, a man who is not a man waits. He looks out over the galaxy of light, brings up his left hand. Sticks out two fingers, a nameless building between them, brings them together. Opens his palm, to encompass kilometers of freeway, asphalt, fiber-optic, nanoflesh. Makes a fist.

At the AD Police headquarters, Nene Romanova has just dropped the last sleep-agonist pill into her coffee, which is already loaded up with enough sugar to match the exports of a Carribean agricorp, enough caffeine to burst a mouse’s heart. She takes a sip, then a swig, knowing full well she shouldn’t mix medications, not giving a shit. Who can blame her? She’s working night shift. She has no choice; the aftermath of the gang war that ravaged the city four months ago, the new patrons of the ADP, all demand terabytes of bureaucratic niceties. Damage assessments, threat reports, funding justifications down to the very last yen, explaining why the computer system was so compromised for so long. Cleaning up after her own messes.

In a not-quite-glamorous apartment just a little north of New Shibuya, eighty-three floors up, Linna Yamazaki considers her latest breakup. She’d miscalculated; she’d thought he was The One, not just Another. Perfect gentleman, financially independent, a little mysterious - she liked mysterious - and, when push came to shove, maybe a little unhinged, too. He’d left with Nemesis, without explanation. But she knew better. He left because he didn’t love her. He wasn’t capable of love like that. She tries not to think about him, looks out between the skyscrapers from her apartment’s big windows. Sees a mugging between two apartment blocks across the street, specks of light moving around erratically. Thinks about what she, from eighty-three floors up, can do about it. Gets up off the couch, walks over to her little mini-studio, pops her aug-goggles on, and shifts into the opening of a _kata_.

In a cramped dressing room next to a cramped stage in a cramped bar in a cramped city, Priss puts on her makeup and her massive wig and becomes Priss The Replicant, she-devil from beyond the stars. Her last few shows have been elsewhere, ping-ponging between nondescript clubs and bars, but now she’s back, at the Hot Legs, for better or for worse. It is, unfortunately, now a cop bar, which means that off-duty officers now outnumber regular down-on-their-luck civvies, but she knew that was what was going to happen when Leon bought it out.

Leon’s having a hard time being on the force now, though. He loves the sinners but hates their sins. Priss hates both; cops make her stomach crawl. Except for Leon, and even then not always.

Enough of that. It’s showtime.

In a lingerie shop in New Shibuya, Sylia Stingray silently closes up shop, then takes the elevator up to her penthouse. Mackie is asleep on the couch, and for a brief moment she considers waking him. But what would be the point of that? Her own amusement. And why does that matter? It doesn’t.

It would be nice if she could sleep, but as it is certain synthetic glands in her body generate so much sleep-agonist that she has no need for it. All it takes is sugar, caffeine, and two hours of rest, and she’s good to go. She spends her nights managing her little luxury-goods empire, sending missives down from on high like a distant god responding to sacrifice, and, when that is done, working on her other job’s minor demands. Picking jobs, receiving payments for past jobs, spending the money she gets from those jobs on cutting-edge printfab tech that sits in her basement until she’s ready to build another generation of suits. It’s lonely work. She doesn’t mind. She’s used to being lonely.

And in the slowly emptying bartown of New Shibuya, a beautiful redheaded woman slips off the subway with the night-shifters. She’s wearing a tight armorjacket, the kind that barely manages to look like a ‘corp suit except for the lumpy ceramic inserts. It is torn in several places, exposing pink flesh, and in a few cases, open wounds. No purse, no coat, just a very small gun.

The woman follows the crowds up and out, but she stands out, red hair next to black, and she knows it. She hears something. Stops, whips her head back for a moment, before letting the mass of humanity press her forward.

When she reaches street level, she takes a few unsteady steps forward, looks around, and runs.

She knows where she’s going, but panic has muddled her normally sharp mind and so she’s not quite able to parse how long it will take to get there. Minutes, at most, but how much time does she have left?

She hears someone shout her name behind her, hears people moving against the rush of other people. The answer, then, is _not much_.

She runs faster.

She hits the Scramble almost instantly, thanks whatever traffic-control-AI that saw fit to pop up the walk sign just as she hit it, crosses. She can hear her pursuers behind her, a subcurrent of angry noise above the blare of the adscreens that dominate the intersection. She keeps going.

Some part of her tells her to take a shortcut, but she knows the cliche too well; young woman running in an alleyway, finds it’s empty, is quickly cornered by her pursuers. She’s seen that vid, and even though she _knows_ art doesn’t imitate life very well some little bit of childhood fear of being _that woman_ keeps her on the well-lit streets, scrambling past people, pushing, shoving, feeling the dull throb of her wounds reopening into sharp pain with every breath she takes. Someone almost grabs her, probably some well-meaning Japanese citizen concerned for a foreigner’s well-being. Chipped reflexes kick in, her knee shoots up, and the grabbing hand vanishes from her senses. She keeps going.

And then she sees it.

It looks different than the last time she saw it, that’s for sure. More white ceramic tiling, less steel. The central tower at the street corner looks a little bigger, too. She’d heard the owner had decided to renovate in late ‘33 after she had a vision or something. Seemed crazy to her, but then again she used to be a netrunner, which meant by definition she was crazy too. She doesn’t dare slow down, stumbles out into the street just when she thinks she can see a break in traffic-

 _BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!_ She’s wrong. The car stops, thank god, barely grazing her leg, but it still scares the shit out of her, and it means her pursuers know very well where she is now. Now she’s sprinting, pumping her legs like there’s no tomorrow, because of course if she’s too slow - well - there won’t be.

She makes it, somehow. Hopefully her enemies will not be so lucky. She tries to pull the glass double-doors open, finds they’re locked. Of course. She doesn’t have time to find an intercom, she doesn’t have her phone, and the door is fucking locked. She pulls out her gun, fires twice-

And the slugs embed themselves in the glass. Of course it’s bulletproof. And there go the alarms, too. Great.

She looks back. Someone, four someones, are moving across the sidewalk at a brisk pace. They’re not running. They don’t need to. They’ve already won.

She slumps over and tries not to cry.

* * *

The alarm jolted Sylia Stingray out of her trance almost immediately, but she did not panic. She did not panic as a rule. Instead, she set her work down, closed out of a few tabs on her computer, and tapped the red flashing square in the bottom of her screen, bringing up the camera feed closest to what had triggered the alarm.

A woman had just fired at her double doors (her screen tagged her gun as an M313 .45 ACP), found that it was ineffective, and now was slumped against the glass as four people approached from outside the feed’s vision. They were definitely moving on her, and Sylia knew she didn’t have the time to scramble downstairs, pistol in hand, and deal with the issue. Wordlessly, she tapped a few keys next to her keyboard, and activated the appropriate defenses.

Two of the intruders approaching the woman suddenly twitched, then collapsed. The others turned towards their fallen, and then they dropped too. The woman’s eyes were wide with shock.

Active-denial maser turrets really were the most wonderful things.

That being taken care of, Sylia remotely unlocked the doors for a fraction of a second, letting the woman slip through, then locked them again. She didn’t activate the exterior lethal or Anti-Boomer defenses quite just yet, but instead pocketed her phone and a revolver, and scrambled to the elevator.

She reached the ground floor in little less than a minute, looked up at the woman, started to draw her weapon - and stopped.

For Sylia now had a good look at the woman, and she knew who she was. Long, dark red hair that hung perfectly straight over her tall curvy body, big, perpetually surprised blue _shojo_ -style eyes, over slight, feminine features. She looked like a supermodel in her late twenties, even though Sylia knew she had to be at least forty by now. Definitely a biosculpt job.

Oh, yes, and she was clearly in shock. She still had the gun held loosely in her hand, and her armorjacket was torn in several places. She was shaking restlessly, glancing around the shop, scanning the lingerie for something only she feared.

This wasn’t like her. This wasn’t like how Sylia remembered her at all.

“Spider Murphy?” Sylia said. “Is that you?”


	4. Chapter 2: Old Friends Made Young Again

**LADYS633 Building**

**11:10 pm**

**June 13th, 2036**

For a moment, she didn’t say anything. Just stood there shaking. Sylia began to draw her gun again.

Then she spoke. Her voice was high and light, like - well - like an anime schoolgirl. Which was probably what she had been going for.

“Yes. Yes, it’s me. Sylia Stingray, I presume?”

“Of course.”

She was still shaking. “You’ve grown,” Spider said.

“I have. Time tends to do that to a person. You, on the other hand-”

“Haven’t.” She snickered. “Sorry. I’m a little high-strung right now. Can we go upstairs? I have some business with you I’d like to discuss. Also it would be nice to get away from those-” here she gestured to the incapacitated thugs outside with her thumb “-bastards.”

“Alright,” Sylia said. “I can keep you safe until the police arrive, but Stingray Luxury Goods generally keeps daytime office hours. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back later.”

Spider’s big blue eyes narrowed. “Ha ha, very funny. Not an option. Besides, I’m not here to talk about Stingray Luxury whatever. My business concerns your  _ other  _ job.”

Her revolver went up immediately.

“Get in the elevator,” Sylia said. “Now.”

* * *

It took them forty seconds for the elevator to hit Sylia’s penthouse, and for all of those forty seconds Sylia was still, her revolver levelled at Spider’s chest without a hint of hesitation.

Inside, of course, she was terrified. But she was very good at not showing that.

The moment the elevator doors opened, Sylia pushed Spider out, stumbling onto the floor. She advanced on her slowly.

“How long have you known?” That was the first question. The time was what would tell her how thoroughly her organization had been compromised.

“Honestly? Since you started the Knight Sabers. Which is what we’re talking about, I assume.”

_ “Of course it’s what we’re fucking talking about,” _ Sylia hissed. “How did you know?”

Spider smiled, big and wide. “Come  _ on _ , Sylia. I knew your father better than anyone short of your mother. I knew what he was working on, I knew he planned to leave it to you, I knew the minute I saw those hardsuits on television that they were yours. Your secret is safe.”

“Forgive me. I have a hard time believing that.”

“That I knew?”

“That my secret is safe. You figured it out, fine. You knew Father well, I’ll grant you that. What I don’t believe is that you didn’t share it with anyone else.”

Spider put up her hands. “I wouldn’t dream of it. No one at Zetatech knows anything about the Sabers except that we think they’re great ‘cause they tie up GENOM resources.”

“You’re certain of that.”

“Sylia-”

“Because I might have believed you if you were still a Netrunner, if you still believed in keeping secrets, but I know you’re not and you don’t. So. How soon before Zetatech blackmails me into doing extractions for them for paltry sums of money?”

“I don’t do the extractions, that’s Janus Yarvin’s department, and he knows  _ nothing _ about you. Look, if I wanted to come to you as anyone other than Spider Murphy, your  _ beloved _ Aunty Murphy, I would have just called you. Over a Zetatech line. It’s company policy.”

Sylia twitched. “Fine, then. I can accept that. You came here as Aunty Murphy. Why? And what’s with the-” here she gestured to her battered appearance with the revolver’s barrel “-ensemble? You don’t need medical attention, do you?”

“A cup of tea would be nice. Worst that happened tonight was my limo got blown up. I’ve got skinweave and healer nanos, though, so I should be okay.”

“You’re sure. You didn’t get shot anywhere.”

“No. Just - let’s just talk about this over some tea. Give me a few minutes.”

She lowered her revolver. “The police will be here in a few minutes, Spider. They’ll want to speak with you, I assume. You may want to wait on that tea.”

“Yeah, about that. Can I trust you to hide me? If the cops know I’m here, GENOM knows I’m here, and I really can’t have that.”

“I suppose,” Sylia said. “They might make associations about what I’ve been doing here as well.” She sighed. “You really had to shoot the door, didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t open. I didn’t have time to do anything else.”

* * *

**11:24 pm**

**One routine police inspection, and one kettle of tea, later**

“So,” said Sylia, watching from her window as the N-Police cop cars hauled the perps off. “They’ll be out soon enough, I assume?” She poured tea from the kettle into the two cups, which were bioceramic laced with streaks of gold. They were expensive, even for her, but tea was important.

Spider sighed. “Depends on who sent them. They blew my limo the minute I got within range of downtown, wiped out half my security detail. I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with them for the past three hours. They’re good, I know that much.”

“I see.” She sipped at her tea, felt the warm liquid trickle down her throat. It was good. “So what brings you here?”

Spider shrugged. “That’s it? We haven’t seen each other since what, ‘28? You sure you don’t want to just catch up?”

“No. I know you’re a major Zetatech executive and that you’ve been linked to a series of Netrunning raids on rival companies, but never explicitly fingered by INTERPOL. I know EBM blames your company for nearly a trillion euro in lost revenue. I know, knowing you, that you probably have been stealing ideas from them and Microtech for years. I know you described your company as holding up the entire Net last year in a closed-doors talk at Davos. I keep tabs on major corporate figures, and most seem to either want your position or want to reduce the magnitude of said position. Am I missing anything?”

“How’d you know about the Davos talk?”

“I was in the live-streaming audience.”

“Damn. Not bad. Hard to get seats if you aren’t worth at least ten billion.” Spider took a swig of her tea. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Been being a good ‘Corp ever since you left. Had to - without people like us the Net would be in total chaos.”

“I’ll ignore that little bit of braggadocio and reiterate: Why are you here?”

“Well, how do I put it?” She looked out the window, let her head rest on her left hand. “I think I found Alt.”

Sylia almost dropped her glass, swallowing the bit of tea she had in her mouth, almost down the wrong pipe. She choked for a second. “Impossible.”

“No. You thought it was impossible, but I always believed otherwise. And now I found her.”

“You said you  _ thought _ you found her. What does that mean?”

“Well, remember how I had to basically split her into chunks and do a random-address simultaneous upload? You know, because I couldn’t exactly drag a couple dozen petabytes of neurodata onto one address without it taking several days? Time I didn’t exactly have?”

“You’ve told me this story before. Many times. Most of my adolescence, in fact.”

“Yeah, and you always thought it was impossible to split a brain into pieces and put it back together.”

“I still do. A memory doesn’t just exist in one lobe, it exists across the whole network of grey and white matter. Cut the white matter that gets the grey bits to talk to one another, compress that, and then decompress it, all you’ve got is a bunch of random activity, neurons firing, that only makes sense if you put all the other parts together. So either you have all of Alt or none of her.”

“Well, I put up digital-code tags preceding each file so I could grab them later. So, again, all I had to do was find the bastards.”

“So why did it take you this long to find a  _ fragment _ of Alt? It’s been what, fourteen years since Arasaka fell?” She knew what the answer was the moment she opened her mouth. She asked all the same.

“Net corruption.” Spider said it like it was supposed to be obvious. For anyone who had used the Net in the ‘20’s, like Sylia, it was, to an extent. In those days you couldn’t so much as send email without a half-dozen different virus protection AI’s watching over everything you did, desperately trying to ferret out whatever hidden packets of code that had latched onto your message and were waiting to explode into violent life on the other end. It had taken decades for the Net’s old functions to come back online, and even then it was a strange kind of Net. Like a city rebuilt on the ruins of an older one.

“You told me that the Net was too dangerous to use for nearly half a decade. I needed the experience and you refused to give it to me. I have to rely on an ameuter ‘runner to run the EW in my operation, now. What changed.”

“Ah. Good question.” Spider sipped her tea. “Sometimes I worried you didn’t understand how dangerous things were back then. Motor-cortex viruses, metafungi, D-Dos self-replicators, hunter-killer AI folded into a handful of terabytes. We found nearly sixty-seven different flavors of zombie virus in three months, in ‘28. But you’re older now. Wiser for sure.”

“Yes. I am. Get to the point. What changed? Where did you look that just happened to hold a few terabytes of Alt Cunningham?”

“Honestly? We found it in the Seathe.”

“The Seathe.”

“Yes.”

“The intermediate mishmash of garbage built up by the netcrash that was too agile to clean. The very primordial soup of synthetic intelligence, where no fragment of data could be sent without being pulled down the LDL’s and corrupted utterly. You’re telling me that you found a clean flag, in digital code, no less, down there.”

“Yep. Dug it out of defective construction coordination servers around Old Berlin. Got it on a Netwatch contract, too, for a cool five billion euro. I don’t even know how to describe something like this, Sylia. It was like sticking your hand in a liquid sea of diarrhea and, I don’t know, shit-eating death snakes, and pulling out the crown jewels, just this big beautiful block of terabytes with an encryption tag. They didn’t even know what it was until I saw it.”

Okay. That was, Sylia had to admit, somewhat impressive. Spider was good at pattern recognition, good enough to figure out what the Seathe had originally been before Rache Bartmoss’s postmortem murder of the old Net. She had a filter function for every occasion. Something wasn’t adding up, though. She took a swig of her tea, rolled it around her mouth, let the bitterness really sink in.

“How’d you know it wasn’t corrupted besides the tag? The tag could be fine, but you could be looking at a few terabytes of algorithm-generated pornographic poetry.”

“True. But when we ran it through a skillchip, it resolved itself. Perfectly.”

“That’s not possible. Like I said, you shouldn’t be able to make sense of a partial engram of neural data. How would you even fit that on a skillchip?”

Spider grinned. “Well,” she said. “Now we come to the trade secrets part of what’s going on.”

“See,” she continued without waiting for Sylia’s reply, “Zetatech has been working on some serious space-compression techniques for neuromorphic chips, so we can cram that much more hardwired memory onto them. I’m not just talking liquid-crystal matrices, Sylia, not just lacing aerogel packets. I’m talking about manipulating individual nanocyte protein-analogs working like full neuromorphic units. Fiddling with the way your dad’s best work self-replicates. Making it even  _ better _ .”

“GENOM certainly won’t be pleased that you’re using proprietary nanotech to build your chips.”

“They don’t have to know. Trade secrets, right? Besides, if they go after Zetatech, they piss off every circuit cowboy on the planet and they know it. Anyway, the point is we’ve basically got mnemonic density an order of magnitude denser than the last generation of skillchips, enough to shove an entire engram into a 5mm cylinder.”

“Impos-” She stopped herself. “Right. So you have a fragment of Alt on a skillchip-like format, and it makes enough sense that you can tell it  _ is _ Alt in the first place.”

“Yeah. It has these fragments of her memories, little blurry bits of things that we could read from a simulated brain. Barely enough to go on, but it is Alt. Which brings me to the business part of things.”

Ah. Now Spider seemed to tense up, like she was afraid of something - perhaps the small but non-zero chance that Sylia might reject her proposal. “You want protection from whoever ordered a hit on you?”

“No,” Spider said. “Zetatech has - contacts in Megatokyo. Mostly cowboys and other flavors of geek, but the kind of people who can find out who blew up my security detail easily enough. Not what I’m looking for.”   
“Well then. I’m willing to listen.”

“I-” Spider made a motion with her hands, one whose purpose Sylia could not discern. “I think that if I can find one fragment of Alt, I can find the rest. I know,” she made the motion again, this time to cut Sylia off, “I know, but it’s like a jigsaw puzzle - pieces just fit together, you know? I thought - I thought you could give me a hand with that. Help me piece together Alt off the company books.”

“Ah. So the board doesn’t know you’re hiring my team.”

“They know I’m in Megatokyo to talk with some contacts on personal matters. They don’t know who I’m hiring, and they don’t need to know, not until I get Alt all put back together.” She sighed. “That was the plan, anyway.”

“Ah.” She was starting to piece things together. “You lost the chip during the assault, and you want my superior knowledge of Megatokyo to find it.”

“Yeah. You don’t mind, do you?”

“I might.”

Spider’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t bullshit me, Sylia. The chip was loaded with a bunch of dummies in a briefcase handcuffed to one of my security detail. They took him out with a frag-chette shot to the sternum, hacked his arm off and took the case. I saw them do this. Blew him up-”

“Just like Johnny?”

“Yeah.” She shuddered, which was an improvement. Bringing up Johnny would have driven her to tears five years ago. “I had to fucking play dead, stopped my own cyberheart just to make the sweeper drones pass over me while they picked off my men.” She was shaking again. 

“I don’t know if they know which chip is real, but it’s only a matter of time before they figure out which one is Alt and they - I don’t know what they want with it, but I want it back, ideally without going to the police. And I know you can do that. You’re the Knight Sabers, for godsakes.”

Sylia watched Spider as she became progressively more unhinged, her well-rounded executive persona giving way to the paranoia of a netrunner. She sipped the last of her tea, and thought.

She’d been watching Spider for tics the whole time, the sort of things even a biosculpt job and extensive cyberization couldn’t hide. And she’d seen them, the little undercurrents of agitation that told her that Spider, for all her kindness, was lying. The shaking was one indicator, but there were others.

There was no question of it. Spider wasn’t telling the whole truth.

But that was all she could tell - that she’d omitted something. Some ulterior motive. She didn’t want Alt back just for Alt’s sake.

In life, Alt Cunningham had been a genius, the kind who flitted from firm to firm like a coding fairy, leaving solved problems and unforeseen innovations in her wake. In her post-life as a coherent AI, she had gone from merely well-regarded to outright legendary. What could a mind like hers do unbound from the kludgy interfaces of a meat brain? Everyone - even Arasaka, in their heyday - wanted to know. Sylia never knew her, of course, but if she had to guess things hadn’t changed.

“Fine,” she said, “name your price.” She’d examine the chip herself, of course, before she handed it over to Spider. Yes. Nene could help her with that.

“Five million euro is my starting price.”

Alright. How much would she push? “Fifteen million euro for this chip, twenty-five million for every other data fragment, plus any travel or equipment replacement expenses.” She  _ knew _ that was unreasonable. Or it would be, if Spider was doing this for personal reasons.

And Spider, she  _ shrugged _ . “Fine. I can live with that.” It was an admission of guilt as much as anything else.

Sylia laughed. “Well, then. I believe that’s all. Now-” Spider’s wide eyes went even wider. “Oh hell. No, you cannot stay with me.”

“Come  _ on _ , Sylia. I don’t know who to trust. If someone on the Zetatech board is dirty, I can’t stay in a regional office, and I sure as hell can’t stay in a hotel. I don’t know who these people are, but I’m not sticking my neck out and just waiting for decapitation.”

“If these people are as good as you say they are,” Sylia said, “They know you’re  _ here _ , with  _ me _ . If you stay here, you run the risk of compromising not only my civilian life, but my ability to function as a Knight Saber. Both will slow down my ability to recover your chip. Are you sure you want that?”

“I-” She looked like she was actually thinking about that. Good. “Okay. Where do I stay, if not here?”

“I’ll have you moved to a cot in one of my safehouses. Covertly, of course, and I can’t guarantee quality lodgings, but you’ll just have to live with that.”

Spider seemed unmoved. “Suits me fine. I’ve lived in worse places. I’ll still probably have to sleep here for the night, though.”

“True.” It was true. She hated the fact that it was true. “The sofa is occupied, though.”

“By whom?”

“Mackie.” She ground her teeth. “He’s home for the summer after studying mechatronics, among-”

“Mackie!” Spider squealed, and it was like she had dropped twenty years off her age, slipping into her biosculpted shell effortlessly. “You had him here all this time and you didn’t tell me?”

“Yes.”

Spider shot up, whirled around, and began making her way towards the door to the living room. “MACKIE!” she shouted. “Mackie Mackie Mackie Mackie Mackie! Aunty Murphy’s home at last!”

Sylia watched her go, stumbling a few times from her wounds. She almost laughed, then rubbed her temples as she felt a headache coming on. This, she thought, was going to be a strange job.

She had no idea how right she was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It dawned on me that perhaps I should explain some parts of CP2020/2077's lore as I go, just to make sure everyone has a firm grasp on what's going on, and to link that lore to BGC's timeline, or at least the fanon links I've constructed. So here goes:
> 
> Spider Murphy - One of the great netrunners (hackers) of the 2010's and 20's, and friend of Rache Bartmoss, who was unquestionably the greatest hacker in history (he was also batshit insane, too, but that's beside the point). She participated in the final assault on Night City's Arasaka tower, and was instrumental in extracting Alt from Arasaka's clutches - only to be forced to rapidly upload her out into the net when enemy forces pinned her down. She watched Johnny Silverhand get blown in half by an autoshotgun. Over the 2020's, she helped take care of Sylia during her adolescence, all the while maneuvering to get herself a spot on the Zetatech Board of Directors. Now she's significantly richer and more powerful than she was in 2020, able to influence the shape of the technology to come through her galaxy of connections. Whether or not she's 'sold out' is a subject to be debated.
> 
> Zetatech - A Silicon Valley tech company in a world where companies like Apple and Google never really took off. They capitalized on the Rising (more on that later) and the corruption of the global computer Net over the 2020's to become one of the world's premier megacorps, masters in neuromorphic and quantum computing among other things, especially 'cleaning' the Net. Getting Spider Murphy on their board was something of a celebrity hire at the time, an attempt to look cooler than they actually were, but the decision has actually done well for the company - her daring netrunner raids have brought in prototypes worth billions of euro, and she's never been caught. Now all they have to do is get MALCORP (of Black Knights, Steel Hearts) out of the computer market, and stay away from anything GENOM does, and they just might be the premier manufacturer of personal electronics on the planet by the end of the decade.


	5. Chapter 3: Chippin' In

**Hot Legs**

**12:46 am**

**June 14th, 2036**

Priss Asagiri never felt more alive than when she was on stage.

It wasn’t just a high. It wasn’t reducible to endorphin A reacting with neuron B. She’d tried, on those narrow nights before she met Sylia, to recreate that high with powders and pills, and she had always come down disappointed.

But this feeling? She could coast on it for a day or two if life went right. She would float through the shithole underside of Megatokyo like a hungry ghost with clacking teeth, her smile better armor than any hardsuit. If everything went right, of course.

Which seemed to be happening less and less these days.

It was why she’d opted for the late-night shows, when the cops cleared out to get some sleep and the only people who were left in the sweltering concrete cavern that was the Hot Legs were people Priss _knew_ loved her. Wanted her. Desired her.

People she wanted back right in return.

Coming down from _Victory,_ she strummed her guitar as the crowd, swarming, sweat-drenched, cheered in rapturous joy. She gave them five seconds, then thrashed the cords of her instrument hard to shut them up. She pulled the mic close to her.

“Okayyyyyyy,” she husked. “That’s the show for tonight. You all motherfuckers better get out of here before your sad excuses for nervous centers melt in the heat, ‘cause tomorrow’s gonna be another _burning_ day.”

“Unless-” and here she smiled just enough to pique their interest, her painted face stretching just a little more than usual, her eyebrows raising just that little bit, her massive wig heaving with every motion of her head, her red eyes burning with passion “-you want a little bonus?”

Another cry went up.She thrashed her guitar again; it wouldn’t do to let that cry go too long and die down, to break the flimsy facade of _her_ for even a second. People might think that they had to leave, had to go home and get some sleep, might _doubt_ her. And she was not going to let them doubt for an instant.

“Okayyyyyy, bonus it is. You know how this goes, kids. I’m gonna pick one of you - one lucky little whoreson - and he better have a song for the Replicants to play. It better be a really fucking good song. Because what happens if his song sucks?” She waited for the response, all but put one gloved hand up to her ear.

_“EAT! HIM! ALIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!”_

“Yeahhhhhh, that’s what I’m talking about. Okay, here we go.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she let her hand sweep out across the audience, fingers curling and uncurling, her pointer finger swirling around in little circles, her arm going back and forth, back and forth.

She rarely picked someone with a shit song, but it took a bit of intuition. Too short, and she looked like she wasn’t serious, wasn’t looking inside their souls, turning them upside down, shaking them until something she liked came out. Too long, and the crowd would grow restless, and, again, she wasn’t going to lose control of them.

 _There_. Upper right in the mosh pit, some muscly suited meathead. Would have looked like a disguised Boomer were it not for the massive wound he was nursing on his right shoulder. She’d psyche him out, see what he had.

“You!” she shouted. He pointed at himself, as if to say _who, me?_ “Yeah, you. Big guy with the bad right shoulder.” She let the crowd pivot their necks to see him, turning from part of the crowd into a victim of its passions. They were all looking at him. “Rough night?” she cooed.

He muttered something she couldn’t hear, then shut his mouth. For a moment, the crowd was silent.

“Well?” she purred. “You got something for me to sing?”

He said something. She couldn’t hear it, but then again she wasn’t supposed to. “I can’t heaaaarrrrr youuuuuu…”

He shouted it. “Chippin’ in!”

“What was that?”

The whole crowd shouted it. _“CHIPPIN’ IIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNN!”_

“Oh-kayyyyyy.” She said it like she felt it. “That’s a little _old_ , doncha’ think? Christ, most of us were _kids_ when Silverhand was big.” She smirked. “How old are you, buddy?”

He said something. “I can’t heaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrr youuuuuuuu…”

_“THIRTY-TWO!”_

“Heh. Shit, man, that’s _old_ . Well,” she said, putting a hand on her cocked hip, “I guess I gotta expect more old folks in this place, yeah? They don’t call it _retro_ thrash for nothing.”

No response. Time to move on. “Okay, let’s take it back to 2020. When Arasaka was king, before the Quake, before the Boomers, but after everything went to shit. Fuck, let’s take it back to 2013, the Night City riots, you know what I’m saying? That was some good shit from the Americans.”

She grinned wide. “Johnny Silverhand. Samurai. Chippin’ In. Okay. Here we go.”

One, two, three, and the speakers kicked in:

_“Got chrome in my bloodstream / Got a hotwired metal soul”_

_“I’m craving that mega-big hit / but they can’t do it for me no more”_

_“Chips are bashin’ in my top / runnin’ hot my slots are shot”_

_“Metal burning beneath my skin / I’m chippin’ in, chippin’ in”_

She knew the song by heart, of course. What kinda Rockergirl would she be if she hadn’t spent hours in that shithole orphanage, earbuds plugged in, mouthing the words again, again? A bad one, that’s for sure:

_“Got that old mega-violence / When I boost shit gets real”_

_“Capacitors burst inside my brain / Boy, you know just how I feel”_

_“Flying tungsten, molten lead / Can’t hurt me ‘cause I’m already dead”_

_“Cermet bone and kevlar skin / I’m chippin’ in!”_

It was like when she rode her bike on the freeway. The feeling of ducking in, ducking out, knowing any wrong move would be her last.

No, it was _better_.

She dropped the base:

_“Chippin’ in… (Got my back to the wall...)”_

_“Chippin’ in… (Can you hear my call?)”_

_“Chippin’ in… (I’m the man of steel…)”_

_“Chippin’ in… (Don’t care what’s real)”_

_“When / I’m / chippin’ in!”_

The song picked up tempo without her, moved from that steady deathmarch grind to something more upbeat for a few measures, something Nene would describe, in that euphemistic way of hers, as a ‘bop’. Which was, of course, entirely wrong. You didn’t bop to Silverhand. You jammed, your head snapping up and down like a puppet whose stringman was having a heart attack:

_“I dream in myomer / My vision’s nitro cold”_

_“Times Square Plus and Kiroshi Special / just lookin’ for that gold”_

_“Burn em’ with my cyberware / take their money, I don’t care”_

_“Lookin’ for that ‘riginal sin / Chippin’ in, I’m chippin’ in”_

She almost didn’t notice the guy with the bad shoulder start to slip through the seething crowd, bouncing between people like a pachinko ball. Almost.

_“‘Cause I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe! / Though I rage and foam and seethe”_

_“Attack ships on fire offa Tannhauser Gate / Only serve to fuel my hate”_

_“Blood synthcoke and gasoline / ‘Cause nothing is what it seems”_

_“In the places where I’ve been / I’m chippin’ in!”_

She didn’t stop, of course. Didn’t want to. Didn’t dare. Besides, this was where the song got interesting, right as soon as she got through this chorus:

_“Chippin’ in… (Got my back to the wall...)”_

_“Chippin’ in… (Can you hear my call?)”_

_“Chippin’ in… (I’m the man of steel…)”_

_“Chippin’ in… (Don’t care what’s real)”_

_“When / I’m / chippin’ in!”_

Damn, that guy was going straight for the stage. Straight for her. What the fuck was his problem? People were starting to notice, especially as he cut a path to the center of the mosh pit. Maybe if she’d done this earlier she’d actually have cops on hand to - No. She just had to get through this instrumental interval, working the guitar like she was giving birth to Baby Jesus himself, and then: “Okay, Satoshi, hit it!”

Satoshi, her keyboard guy, did in fact hit it, and Rutger Hauer spoke his great Blade Runner monologue over the speakers:

_“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe._ _Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”_

And now, she got to thrash:

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

Yeah. That was the good shit right there, the real solo scene:

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

They were singing it with her, the crowd, her whole world. They loved it. She _lived_ for it, as the backup guitar slowly rose to its crescendo.

She didn’t see the man get closer, close enough to touch her. If she had, things might have been very different.

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO DIE!”_

_“TIME TO D-”_

Without warning, he stepped up onto the stage, grabbed her by the shoulder-

She screamed.

-Turned her around, pushed her so that she bent over just a little, yanked her wig aside, then her real hair-

Hard.

And then something went _THWUMP_ at the base of her skull and she saw red.

Priss sucked in a breath. Realized she was screaming. Realized the whole world was 

screaming. Realized that fucker had somehow got his hands on her and-

And she felt her strength return, and she jammed an elbow into his gut.

The musclehead grunted in pain, staggered back as she whirled around, just like Linna had taught her, to kick him straight in the dick. _That_ did the trick, and he collapsed with little fanfare. The band had stopped playing; they were stock-still, until Satoshi grabbed the guy under his armpits and hoisted him up.

She moved on him, and then something inside her head _pulsed_. She moved faster.

She knew the crowd was watching; she didn’t care. _Eat Them Alive_ , was the motto of Priss the Replicant.

“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” she screamed in his face. “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST PUT IN ME?!”

It pulsed again, and it was like she was between two trucks in a head-on collision. Which is to say, it fucking _hurt_.

“Had to,” he muttered. “You’re s’posed to be the one…”

He looked almost sorry.

“ANSWER ME, YOU COCKSUCKER! YOU LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT! WHAT DID YOU JUST _DO_?!”

“You’llthankmelater,” and now words were tumbling out of his mouth as she grabbed him by the collar and tried to stand him up. “Greatestgiftagirlcouldaskfor…”

She let him go from the collar, then grabbed him by the throat. It _pulsed_ again, and she almost let him go, but then-

Then she thought about all the things she could do to a guy who didn’t fight back, like gouge his pretentious designer silver-and-gold optics out-

And the thing _pulsed_ , and red seemed to fill up the corners of her vision, and she knew that Satoshi was shouting something at her, could recognize her own name, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying-

And then-

_BWAAAAAAAAAM!_

A gunshot.

The sound echoed through the Hot Legs, resonated, bounced off itself, and it startled Priss enough that she dropped the guy. She staggered back as the noise flared up, took on strange new dimensions, and _pulsed_ again.

“That’s enough, everybody! Show’s over. Let’s go home.”

Oh god. That voice. And that gun. She knew them both.

Leon. He’d fired a round up into the rafters to get everyone to shut up before a riot started. The guy was lying on the stage, limp, looking like he pissed himself.

Priss took all this in, and, for a brief moment, understood it, and felt thankful.

Then the thing _pulsed_ again, and she threw up.

* * *

**Priss’s dressing room**

**1:02 am**

She sent the band home as soon as possible, staggered past her manager, her open cleavage stained with vomit. She washed herself in her dressing room, tore off all her stage outfit, drowned her makeup in barely-potable water, then put on an emergency change of clothes - a t-shirt two sizes too big for her that was fan merchandise, panties, and some nondescript shorts. She would have normally just slipped into her riding gear and let that be that, but she was _not_ going home tonight.

Not while whatever that guy had put in her was _pulsing_ like that.

Priss rubbed the back of her neck where the guy had made the - injection? At first it had felt like there was something under there, a circle of hard stuff just at the soft base of her skull. Now it was much fainter, but still there, and it felt like there was stuff around it, too, like roots from a tree.

She needed to call Sylia. Would she even be awake at this hour? Hopefully. She had no idea what to do next. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before.

Oh god, what if this was some sort of thing to do with her other job? What if she walked into Sylia’s apartment and spread some kind of killer bug, or had her motor cortex overriden so she turned into a killer zombie? Had that guy known? Why her? _Why her?_

A knock on her door. “You decent?” Leon. Of course he was still here. “Security got rid of the guy. Want me to get the on-duty cops?”

“No,” she moaned, and it was only while she was speaking that she realized she sounded like a whore with strep throat.

“The first, or the second?”

Her head hurt. “You can come in. Just - don’t call the cops.”

“Or an ambulance?”

“Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.”

The door opened. Leon slipped in, wearing his usual casual outfit. Jeans and a t-shirt. To be more precise, jeans in the middle of one of the hottest summers Megatokyo had experienced in three years. Crazy bastard.

“You good?”

She hated feeling like this. Her curled up in a ball on the chair and trying not to retch, and him kneeling down to her level like he was her father.

“No.”

“Great. So you’re not in denial. That’s better than most times.”

“Ha ha. Funny.” She looked at him. “What the fuck, dude.”

He shrugged. It was a friendly shrug. “Beats me. That guy left pretty fast. By the time I was able to convince security to let me go after him, he was gone.”

“Great. So now I’m stuck with - aaarrrrrggggghhhh.”

It _pulsed_ again, and Priss’s vision filled totally with red, and then, something else. Something that looked like, sounded like -

_INTEGRATION 85% COMPLETE. BEGINNING WAKEUP CYCLES FOR PERSONA._

Wait. What the fuck was that? It was like - if the text on a typewriter had a voice, it would look like that. Would _sound_ like that.

“You good?”

“Just got a headache. Really bad one.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Oh.”

“Priss Asagiri, brought low by a bad headache? Come on. Something else is happening.”

“Yeah, Leon,” she deadpanned. “I’m being infected by a fucking body snatcher zombie killer chip and I have no idea why. I feel like shit, I already threw up on stage. Clowns to the right of me, jokers to the left-”

“And here I am, stuck in the middle with you?”

“Damn.” He was learning to anticpate her insults. She was going to have to try harder. “Yeah. Something like that.”

_INTEGRATION 93% COMPLETE. PERSONA CURRENTLY IN BLANKSPACE CYCLE #003. INITIATING SENSORY LINK._

“AGH! ARRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!” Her eyes felt like they were going to grow claws and pull themselves out of her sockets! Her whole face felt like it was going to just up and fall off! What the hell was going on?

“Priss!”

“M’ fine, m’fine-”

“No you’re not fine, you’re going to fall over any second. C’mere-”

She felt him touch her elbow. It felt normal, at first, and then her skin was on fire.

“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!” She thrashed out, but her limbs were miles away and they just kinda twitched, and she was still seeing red.

“Okay. Priss. I’m not touching you-”

_INTEGRATION 97% COMPLETE. SENSORY LINKS FULLY FUNCTIONAL. MNEMONIC LINKS FULLY FUNCTIONAL._

_BEGINNING SUBCONSCIOUS MELDING. SIMULATING HYPOTHALAMIC PROCEDURE “MORPHEUS”._

And then she tilted back just a little-

“Ohshit PRISS!”

And she was falling, falling into-

_SECONDARY PERSONA IN FULL RECONSTRUCTIVE MODE. TERTIARY MNEMONIC FRAGMENTS UNDERGOING DREAM-OF-THE-DOLL PROCESSING._

_PREPARING TO ENTER-_

* * *

**June 14th, 2036**

**4:28 pm**

-And then Priss woke up.

Her eyes shot open, couldn’t adjust to light, slammed shut again. She blinked a few times.

What just happened? Last thing she remembered was that thing in her head - Leon was there - and it was talking-

“Well, well, well, look who finally decided to boot up. Wake the fuck up, Rockergirl. We’ve got shit to do.”

What the fuck was that?

Okay, Priss figured, either she was dead or she wasn’t dead. Warm, sort of comfy, smelled slightly of sweat, probably not dead. She’d be in hell piling stones otherwise, at least if Linna-

“Hey. Yo. Earth to Rockergirl. Come on, that’s the ticket. Stop thinking about Linna. Eyes up.”

Okay. She had heard that. Pretty clearly. But she couldn’t quite pin down where it came from. Ugh. So either she was hallucinating or-

“Close. Not quite. Come on. Open those baby bloodshots.”

Okay, okay, fine.

She opened her eyes.

So she was in someone’s apartment. Someone’s bedroom. All covered up in blankets. The sun was streaming in through the venetian blinds. How long had she been out?

“Awhile, but that doesn’t matter. You’ve been through worse.”

Who the hell-

And then she saw him.

There was a man leaning against the far wall. A man who wasn’t Leon. But-

But she knew him.

He was unmistakable. The red aviator glasses, the unkempt dark hair and beard that seemed to resolve themselves _just_ right. The dangling dogtag that she knew would say 42nd Mechanized Infantry if she walked up to him and pulled it off. The rumpled armorvest, with a loose oni mask scrawled in white spraypaint on the front.

The gleaming chrome prosthetic arm, whose hand clenched and unclenched like the beating of a human heart.

She knew exactly who this was. Oh yes. But-

“Johnny Silverhand?” she said, hoarse and barely there. “But - you’re supposed to be dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I had to do a musical interlude somewhere with the iconic song - its lyrics butchered by my editorial designs, of course - of Cyberpunk 2020 - plus I had to get that chip into Priss's head despite her not having a chipjack (I don't see her as a big fan of cyberware). Anyway, as screenwriters put it, we just had the inciting incident, and now the plot should kick into high gear momentarily.
> 
> Yes, I'm writing this instead of Vigilante's Run, churning out chapters on the daily, because I have a clearer idea of where I want to go with this story in the present time. I want to deliver content and that's just what's coming easily right now.
> 
> As for Johnny Silverhand, I won't exposit too much on him; it'll be more fun to learn about him as the story goes on, and I don't think it'll sacrifice quality. Suffice to say that he's being played be Keanu Reeves in CP2077, he is a famous rockstar (because in the alternate timeline of Cyberpunk 2020, rock n' roll isn't just 'dad music'), and he is supposed to be dead - blown in half by an autoshotgun during the final days of the Fourth Corporate War.


	6. Chapter 4: Bad Trips

At first, Johnny Silverhand, legendary veteran of the Central American Wars, the rockstar who defined the first two decades of the 2000’s, did not respond.

Priss shook her head a few times. Nope, he was still there, still in the same place, still just watching her. So he was - real? Or at least her senses were treating him as real.

Except, again, he was supposed to be dead. To have _been_ dead for a good fourteen years.

She could hear her inner Sylia going on right now: _Occam’s Razor, Priss, dictates that the explanation with the fewest moving parts is the most likely. So, either he is a ghost, in which case the metaphysical implications are too broad to comprehend, or he is a hallucination cooked up by your brain after a traumatic experience. It’s hardly a choice_.

Then again… 

“...You are Johnny Silverhand, right?”

He laughed at that. Big, throaty, booming. “Ha! The man himself in front of her eyes and all she can do is doubt! Of course I’m Johnny Silverhand. What do I look like, his stunt double?”

She bristled at that. “Yeah, well. Like I said, you’re supposed to be dead.”

Priss swore she could see him roll his eyes under his shades. “Yeah. I’m supposed to be dead. Lotta people keep telling me that. Guess rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain put it.”

“Don’t know who that is. Don’t care.” Which meant… “So you’re either a ghost, which is some shit I don’t even want to go into-”

“Ehhh.” Johnny wiggled his cyberarm’s hand, his palm horizontal. “Kinda?”

“Or you’re a hallucination and I’m going crazy.”

“Closer.” He shrugged. “Why don’t I just show you.”

Suddenly her vision went blurry, like the world was about to pulse again. But it didn’t, and when she got a handle on her surroundings again, Silverhand had moved from leaning on the opposite wall to kneeling by her bedside.

“What-” the fuck was that, she wanted to say, but for some reason she didn’t. “Teleportation?”

“No,” the Johnny-ghost said, clearly disappointed. “Let’s see. How much do you remember of the past few hours?”

“You sound like a shrink. What makes you think I’m gonna tell you what I remember?”

“Okay, fine, so you don’t want to work with me. I’ll tell you. You remember performing at the Hot Legs, you remember getting grabbed by some guy, you remember getting injected with something, Leon was there, and then you just kinda faded out. That about right?”

“I-” She thought for a moment. He was right. That was all she remembered - blurry and slippery like a wet painting, but the events were there. “How did you know that?”

“Well,” he said, “because I can read your memories.”

She started to move, eyes going wide. She tried to scramble back, but her vision went blurry. Suddenly, Johnny was looming over her, floating in midair. Totally different position, and he’d just - how?

“Easy there. Calm down. Your secrets are safe. I’m not telepathic.”

“But you just said-”

“I can read your memories,” Johnny said, “because I’m inside your brain. Tell you what. Remember the thing the guy put in the back of your head? The disk under the skin?”

“Yeah… It was growing, expanding…”

“Well. That’s me.”

She cocked her head to the side. “First off, get out of my personal space before I punch you. Second off, _what the fuck does that mean_.”

“Okay.” And her vision blurred, skipped like an old music player. He was standing with his arms behind his back, soldier-style, ramrod straight on the carpet.He cleared his throat, and began to speak in one long breath.

“I am an exact copy of the mind of Johnny Silverhand, who is, as you noticed, dead, to the point that I might as well just be him. I am stored on a datamass a little larger than a 5mm bullet, which can either fit into an MRAM chip socket or, if a given host has no socket to speak of, can lodge itself at the base of the brainstem and rapidly grow the carbon nanotube electrodes needed to communicate with the host’s conscious and unconscious mind. As such, now that I’m woven into your brain like real plugs, I can read your brain activity, and to a degree manipulate it, especially the sensory cortex. Which means-”

He snapped his fingers, and the world blurred.

When her vision resolved, he was still there. No - everywhere. An army of Johnnies blanketed the carpet, stuck out from the walls like fungi. They moved as one. When they spoke, it was like a wave crashing over her.

 **“-I can do** **_this_ ** **.”** They gestured widely, like a flock of rockstar-shaped birds about to take off. **“Any questions?”**

Priss’s jaw worked for a few moments, going up and down. Then, having nothing of value to say, she simply said, “Okay, what the fuck.”

**“Heh. Can a ghost do that? Can a hallucination do any of this? I don’t think so.”**

“But you just said you _were_ a hallucination-”

 **“Shit. You’re right.”** Her vision blurred again, and then it was just the one Johnny, standing on the shag carpet. She looked around, took in the bedroom a little. It was painted a quiet beige, and the lights were off. There was a poster of her Chiba concert on the far wall near a dresser, the one where the microphone cord coiled around her like a whip. Priss silently resolved to get the hell out of here as soon as she could feel her legs again. “Okay. Sorry about that, I just figured some shock therapy would work. Anyway, yeah. I guess I’m sort of a hallucination, but the point is that I’m a hallucination which couldn’t happen if you were crazy. Regular nutter’s brains just aren’t wired that way.”

“Whatever. I’m sure nutters say that to themselves all the time,” she said, waving a hand in dismissal. Focusing on them, she began to feel her legs. Slow, sluggish, half-numb, but there. She could wiggle her toes all at once, but not individually. “This is total bullshit, but I guess it makes some small amount of sense. Dream logic. Whatever.”

“Oh, so I’m a dream, now.” He cocked his head to the side. Was he hurt by that? It didn’t look like it.

But there was something there. A little bit of hurt that she felt, that was there one moment and then flitted away the next. Like someone else’s feelings crossing the line into her head.

Oh. That made sense. If he could read her thoughts, then maybe-

“Yeah. You can read mine.” Johnny sighed. “Not as well, ‘cause I’m built for that sort of thing and you aren’t, but yeah. Does that convince you I’m real? Does that help at all?”

Well, shit. “Sure. Occam’s razor and all that jazz.” Priss leaned back, and tried to focus on the ceiling. She could move her toes one at a time now, but her legs were still stuck. She tried to bend her knees. They didn’t respond. “You’re in my head, I’m in yours. I can live with that.” She arched her back, clasped her hands together behind her, and stretched up and out. Weirdly enough, her arms worked just fine, but her legs didn’t work at all. What the hell was up with that? “Now, Johnny, do you have any idea where I am? What I’ve been doing for the past-”

“Fifteen hours or so? Adapting. To me being inside you. Probably comatose. And I wake up when you wake up, so no, I don’t know where you are. We’re both flying blind here.”

“Great.” A rough course of action began to form inside her mind. “I gotta get out of here, then.”

She could hear footsteps, slow and heavy, somewhere in the distance behind the one door, or was that just her own heart? Her legs were wobbly as she slung them over the bed and tried to balance on them. She had to think about every action she was taking - planting her feet on the floor, shifting her balance to her planted feet without falling forward - and she really hated it. Meanwhile, Johnny’s digi-ghost just stood there while she squatted on the floor and tried to rise on limbs that felt like they could go Jenga on her at any moment.

A thought occurred to her. “You’re doing this, aren’t you?”

“Doing what?”

“Fucking with my head so I can’t use my legs. I should be able to walk right out of here, but you’re not letting me. Sick bastard.”

“I’m not doing anything. It’s probably just an integration glitch.”

“Well then,” Priss growled, “Unglitch it so I can get out of here-” and then she yelped in surprise as her legs bent and she fell facefirst to the floor.

“Okay, I did _that_. You’re going to go talk with your boss, right? See if there’s a way to get me out of your head. Don’t lie. I can tell what you’re going to do.” He looked pissed, even with those big aviator shades on.

“Fucker,” she mumbled as she began to rise again. This time, her legs felt almost stable, too, as she raised herself up to her full height, just at eye level with Johnny. “What do you care what I do? You’re a freerider on _my_ goddamn brain. You want to have a say in what I do, you gotta pay rent or some shit.”

“Well, pardon _me_ , rockergirl. I’m just trying not to die again because you want to do something stupid like yank me out. We’re too wired at this point. You pull me out, I’m mostly running as a side process on your grey matter, so _I_ die. Plus, you pull me out, the chip triggers a failsafe that gives you a lethal stroke. Short of killing yourself, pulling me out, and then magically unkilling yourself, I think you and I are stuck together.”

“Watch me,” Priss smirked. “You seriously think I’m stupid enough to believe the shit you’re feeding me? Oh, no. I’m gonna get out of here, I’m gonna call Sylia, and once you’re out of my head, we’ll decide whether or not I keep you around or if I just feed you to a stray cat. Got that?”

He blinked out of existence, then the next thing she knew Johnny had his silverhand on her shoulder. It wasn’t just disorienting, it was downright bizarre. His shades had disappeared, which meant she got a really good look at his eyes, a dull dark brown that was almost but not quite black. She could feel his hand on her shoulder through her shirt, the uneven, quivering grip of the hand digging into her skin.

“Get off me.”

“Look. Rockergirl.” He was desperate; she could sense it through their link. “I really don’t want to die, you got that? Especially not because you insisted on doing something really, really dumb to get rid of me. Look, if I promise to stay out of your motor cortex, will we be okay? I’m sorry about doing that thing with your legs, I was scared. I _am_ scared.”

“I know that. I don’t care.”

“Okay, fine. Go call Sylia or whatever. You don’t believe me when I say cutting my chip out is a really bad idea, see what she thinks. You’ll trust her, at least.” He sighed, then flickered, and then he was gone. She could still vaguely feel the outline of his hand, cold yet clearly alive, on her shoulder.

Priss turned around, looking for Johnny. Nope. He was gone for the time being. She stumbled to the door, threw it open-

And found herself looking straight at Leon.

Blue eyes met red eyes as she craned her neck just a bit to look up at the ADP officer in what looked to be a relatively nondescript hallway. His eyebrows were raised high in surprise.

“What are you doing here?” she said stupidly.

“What are you doing _up_?” he said.

“None of your damn business-”

He leaned across the doorframe. “It kind of is, Priss. A, it’s my place, and B, if you’ve been in a coma for the past fifteen hours after falling unconscious it seems like a bad idea to just start driving around and rocking out.”

“Waitaminute.” Something clicked into place inside her head. “Have I been sleeping in your bed?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because after the first hour of you not responding, I figured someone had to take care of you if you weren’t gonna go to a hospital.”

“So you… nursed me.”

“Yep.” She looked for some sort of catch, some sort of resentment in his eyes; she could find none. Leon was disarming like that, his sheer earnestness. Living in Megatokyo turned everything into an exchange of favors, promises, but Leon just didn’t seem to abide by that code. He did nice things for other people without being asked, and then asked for nothing but a smile in return. She was waiting for the day when he pulled all his markers in, but she’d known him for four years now and it hadn’t happened. “I pulled up a guide on the Net, changed your clothes so you didn’t catch a cold from your own sweat, stuff like that.”

“So, no bedpan?” She was flicking through all the stuff Linna said she’d seen Nurse Boomers do on TV, struggling to visualize Leon doing any of it.

“You didn’t do that. Probably are gonna want to do that now.” He pointed down the hallway. “Bathroom’s second-door on the right-”

And then something else clicked into place. “Am I wearing your clothes?”

She looked down. Her clothes were loose and baggy over her frame. She grabbed a bit of her t-shirt. It was grey and had blue text in English on it over a skyline. Reaching into her memory, she tried to decipher the shirt. She squinted.

“That’s-” Leon started to speak.

“The 2031 31st Annual Run for LA Recovery 15K Marathon.” She boggled the moment the words finished leaving her mouth, perfectly pronounced. How had she known what that meant?

“Huh,” Leon said. “I genuinely didn’t know you knew my native tongue until today.” He grinned. “You never fail to amaze me, Priss.”

“What? Dude, I barely know enough English to write song lyrics and that’s it.”

Now it was Leon’s turn to boggle. “You do realize we’ve been speaking English ever since I opened the door?”

“What? Are you crazy? We’re speaking Japanese. I mean, it sounds like Japanese. I mean-”

“And that you were yelling at some guy in nearly perfect English for the past ten minutes? I could hear you all the way from my living room.”

Priss was dumbstruck.

“I mean, everyone used to say I was turning Japanese when I moved here, so I guess it can go the other-”

“That’s not fucking funny!” Priss screamed. “Not! Funny! At! All!”

He backed off, but only a little bit. “Okay! Okay! Calm down! What’s the big deal? It was one bad joke!”

“You wanna know what’s funny?” she said, whirling around to face the bedroom. “Come out, you piece of shit!”

Johnny materialized in the center of the room, a shit-eating grin on his face. “Okay, yeah, I did that. Didn’t mean to, it just sorta-”

“This!” Priss shouted, pointing an accusing finger at the dead rockstar. “This fucker got inside my head, and now he knows everything about me, and he’s just acting like everything’s cool!”

“Uh, Priss?”

“WHAT.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“He can’t see me, remember?”

“Fine,” she growled. Priss sucked a breath in through her teeth, then let it out. “Apparently that chip in my head was some sort of AI, so now I’ve got this-” here she cocked a thumb towards where she saw Johnny “-smug asshole rockstar inside my head and he’s making it _look_ like he’s somewhere when he really isn’t, and he’s been trying to do anything he can just so I don’t have him yanked out, and I got injected by some crazy fucker for this, and holy _shit_ I am angry right now. So,” she continued, sucking in air steadily, “if I could get a change of clothes and all of my other shit back real soon, that’d be great. Be fan-fucking-tastic.”

“Which rockstar?”

“What?”

“I said, what rockstar? You make it sound like it was some garbage dude like Kurt Cobain or something.”

“Johnny Silverhand,” Priss ground out.

Leon’s eyes went wide. “Wait. Hold up. THE Johnny Silverhand?”

“Yes.”

“We are talking about the same Silverhand here, right? Dated Alt Cunningham? CenAm war vet? ‘Chippin’ in’? ‘Never Fade Away’? Ran with the craziest crowd of Edgerunners and mercenary types ever seen since the Avengers movies?”  
“Yeah. I guess. He’s got the armorjacket and the glasses and the hand and everything.”

Leon boggled. “Ho. Ly. Shit.”

Priss gave him a glare. “What?”

“Oh, come on! Johnny Silverhand! The Last Rockstar! Before Euro-house and Neurotrap and all that other bullshit swallowed pop culture whole! The greatest musician of the twenty-first century!” He paused, coughed. “Besides you, of course. And even then, I mean, come on, you call what you do retrothrash, right?”

“I call it _music_ ,” she deadpanned. “Everyone else calls it retrothrash.”

“That,” he said, pointing at her, “is exactly something Johnny Silverhand would say.” His blue eyes glimmered with excitement. “Holy shit. You know, when they said he was dead, after the Fourth Corporate? First thing I did, I bought a full vinyl collection for like two grand.” He scratched his chin. “Oh man! I still have that thing in a storage unit in San Fran! I was gonna auction it off to some guy in Singapore but that fell through. Hey, if you want it, you can have it, I can get it shipped over. Man, Johnny Silverhand. So cool.”

Johnny laughed. “He seems nice.”

“Yuh-huh,” Priss said.

“Hey, maybe I could override your motor cortex for a bit and he could get an autograph?”

“Fuck no.”

Leon raised an eyebrow. “What’d he say?”

“Nothin’,” Priss mumbled.

“Okay.” A thought seemed to occur to him. “It’s gonna be really awkward if you have to talk with Johnny directly just to communicate. Like, you’re walking down the street and he says something, so then it looks like you’re talking to yourself. You should probably find a way around that.”

“Yeah,” Priss said, “maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Whatever. Look, can you, uh, squeeze aside? I think I have to use the bathroom.” Also, she really, really, wanted to get away from fanboy Leon.

But he didn’t move. “What do you mean whatever?”

She decided to tell him the truth, Johnny’s interference be damned. “I mean I’m gonna go call my boss as soon as I’m done with my business and see if I can get this thing removed.”

Leon looked shocked, almost hurt. “Seriously? You’ve got the greatest musician of the twenty-first century-”

“Besides me.”

“-whatever, in your head, and you just want to toss him? Not, you know, get some advice from him? Some mentorship?”

“Heh,” Johnny snickered behind her. “You don’t really like mentors, do you? ‘Cept for, you know, _her_.”

She cocked her head in his general direction, trying to keep him from teleporting again - Johnny behind Leon would just be too weird. “What the hell does that mean?” Leon perked up, trying to peer over Priss, but she didn’t care.

“Hey, I’m agreeing with you. I can see inside your head, remember? And the minute he brought up mentorship you thought about having a _boss_ . And, you know, how much you hate the whole idea of authority figures in general. Except, well, for _her_.”

“I mean the part about _her_. Who’s she?”

He laughed. “Oh, we both know who _she_ is. The one person you let tell you what to do. Every memory involving her, or at least the ones I’ve been digging through, they’re so - _tainted_. So many different feelings all knotted together in this big mass of ambiguity.”

“Shut up. Just shut the fuck up.” She turned to Leon. “Seriously, can I just go? And can you get my stuff, which I assume you have?” A thought occurred to her. “You do have my stuff, right? My bike and everything?”

“Yep. Hooked the autodrive up to my car so it followed me home.” He didn’t move, though. “Listen-”

“Leon. Dude.” She looked at him, right at his face instead of his massive pecs. “I’m really not in the mood for conversation right now. So you’re gonna give me my phone back, and I’m gonna go call Sylia. Just - leave me alone right now. I feel like garbage.”

Leon stepped aside. “Suits me fine,” he said. He mock-saluted her.

“Whatever,” she said, and stormed past him.

* * *

**Leon’s Apartment, District 8**

**June 14th, 2036**

**4:42 pm**

“Okay,” Leon said, hefting a small plastic shopping bag onto the ottoman. Priss was sitting on the couch opposite his wallscreen in his living room, where a few posters of various underground rockers, people with names like Boy Ratty and Raptaku, were the only real signs that anyone lived here outside of its IKEA-catalog genericness. “I packed all your loose stuff - keys, wallet, et cetera - in here.” He put another, larger, red duffel bag on the ottoman, one which looked nearly full to bursting. A tag plastic marked it in crude kana as ‘Backup Stuff’. “Don’t know what was in here. it’s got a biometric lock.”

“Backup stuff,” Priss said. “Spare riding gear, couple a’ guns, burner phone, switchblade. In case I gotta go to ground. You know, for my _other_ job. Shouldn’t need any of it right now.” She snatched the shopping bag from him and went through it, checking to make sure everything was there. Okay, there were; her backup keys for her civvie bike, a little magnetic cylinder with intricate nanoetchings across its surface; her wallet, driver’s license and debit card inside (she didn’t keep much else in there because she didn’t _have_ much else); her phone, a featureless black slate rigged with a custom quantum encryption suite courtesy of the Knight Sabers; a six-inch tungsten carbide switchblade; and the _piece de resistance_ , a big clumsy handgun with only one magazine.But most of the guns she kept in there were distinctly _not_ street-legal, so she wasn’t going to show them to Leon.

“What,” Leon said, looking at her gun like it was about to grow teeth and bite him, “the hell is that?”

“Member IV. Hobbyist 3D printer forum guys. Remember that? I used to have one, basically a heavy rifle smooshed down into a handcannon. Lost it way back in ‘32.” She sighed. “Anyway, this model uses a laser-ignition system so it can take either electrothermal ammo _or_ regular caseless, plus they quadrupled the mag capacity using triple columning. Twelve seven point sixty-two rounds, plasmatic or whatever, drops whatever you point it at, or so they say.

“Huh.” She couldn’t read the expression on Leon’s face. “Is that even street-legal?”

Priss gave him a look that would have withered small plant life, then unloaded the handcannon and set it down. “Okay, that’s all my stuff. Thanks, Leon. Mind if I call Sylia now?”

“Go nuts,” he said. She picked up her phone, and it lit up with MISSED CALL UNKNOWN NUMBER: VOICEMAIL 7 MESSAGES.

Great. She knew exactly who that was. She dialed Sylia’s number. It took longer to start ringing than a regular call, presumably because of the quantum encryption and the anti-trace mechanisms kicking in, and yet she didn’t have to wait long, because Sylia picked up on the first ring.

“Priss.” Yep. That was her, in her disappointed schoolteacher voice, the kind that would take gold stars away from kindergarteners.

“Sylia.”

“Where have you been?”

“No one called you on this number?” Gee, thanks Leon. He knew who her Saber boss was, had probably had her phone by his side for most of the day. Did he think she’d get mad at him for picking up?

Well, okay, she probably would have, but that was beside the point.

“No.”

“Great. Great. I - wow - it’s been kind of a weird day. Lotta stuff happening. Okay, I was asleep for fifteen hours - and before you make some snide remark about my sleep habits, know that it was not by choice - so I guess that really doesn’t count?”

“Priss, what happened? Last I recall you were getting ready for another show, and then it was as though you dropped off the face of the earth. Did something interrupt your usual schedule?”

“Yeah. A guy came up on stage and grabbed me and then he stuck this chip injector in the back of my head, okay? Then the club staff just kinda kicked him out minus a few teeth. I went back to my dressing room, heard voices, passed out, and next thing you know Leon took me back to his place and now I’m here.” She paused. “No, he did not take advantage of me. He’s better than that.”

Leon flashed her a goofy grin full of teeth, gave her a thumbs-up.

“Thank goodness,” Sylia said. “I was afraid I was going to have to deal with the poor man personally. Now, what was that you said about a chip injector? Last I recall, you don’t have interface plugs, much less a chip slot.”

“Well, you’re not wrong. It kinda went through my skin somehow and grew nanotrodes all around my brain like a normal ‘face.”

“How would you know what a chip does? And how would it have grown into your brain in less than a day - one moment.” She could hear Sylia, distant now. “-that’s the one? I’m impressed you could make a battery that small. One of a kind?” Another pause, and then Sylia was back at full volume. “Tell me, Priss, what exactly does that chip contain? Any new memories, inexplicable urges to write AI’s and access the Net, that sort of thing?”

What? “I mean, it’s got Johnny Silverhand’s brain on it. That’s about all I figured out over the past few minutes. No real desires to become Saber Pink, though.”

Sylia did not respond first, then Priss could hear her put the phone down, then short snippets of conversation between her and some other woman who sounded younger. Nene? No, even Nene didn’t sound as cutesy as this mystery person. She could only make out a few whispered words. Words like ‘fucking’, ‘impossible, ‘emulation’, ‘kill her’, and something with the prefix ‘neuro’.

After about a minute of the conversation steadily growing louder, Sylia returned. “Priss, what you’ve been injected with is in fact an item that an old associate of mine would very much like back intact. Apparently Johnny is just a reader for a dissociated collection of mnemonic pathways or some other silly thing.”

“Like the needle on a record player?”

“Yes, if the record in question had been smashed into nearly-illegible pieces. Now, she says if she can get it removed she’ll pay us something like fifteen million euro, and for once I’ll gladly give you ten percent of that, since you helped solve this little issue so quickly.”

Priss nearly dropped the phone in shock.

Fifteen million euro. Fifteen _million_ . The most she’d ever had in her bank account was about twenty thousand. The most the Knight Sabers had ever been paid for a job was offing the GENOM Automotive’s division head, but that had been a good fifty million euro, and the client had only given them _half_ that because the offing ‘attracted too much public attention’ (They were the Knight Sabers, of _course_ everything they did was going to be highly publicized), and Sylia had only given them twenty _thousand_ each because she needed to privately buy a very expensive nanoprinter to build the new hardsuits’ armor, and because cash infusions larger than that would look suspicious or some shitty reason like that.

And now Sylia was casually offering her one and a half _million_ to go over to the LADYS633 and have a surgeon pop her head open to get that annoying bastard out, which she wanted to do anyway. What could she do with one point five _million_? Make Linna extremely jealous, for one. Buy a bigger trailer, for another, maybe even upgrade her bike, wave some money around and buy one of those Malorian Spike-Shredder’s she’d had her eye on for awhile… 

“Priss?” It was Leon. “You’re drooling,” he stage-whispered, hands cupped around his mouth. “What? Oh, yeah. Um. Sure, Sylia, I’ll be over there in a bit, just let me-”

Which was when Johnny materialized right in front of her, arms crossed, the fingers of his cyberarm tapping on his meat one, one after another, like falling water.

“No,” he said, leaning in with startling intensity, his languorous air dropping away. “What did I tell you? You pop me out and you die.”

“Priss?” Sylia.

“One sec. Silverhand’s saying if I pop the chip I’ll die.”

“That’s not - impossible. Likely, actually. We’ll just have to see what can be done. Would you mind asking your virtual companion how deeply integrated he is with your grey matter?”

She shrugged, looked at Johnny. “Type-Six is as close as I got,” he said quickly.

“He says Type-Six?”

“Yes. That would most likely be fatal. Any interface which reads that deep can’t be removed short of using guided neurosurgery to sever any nonessential nanotrodes over several days.”

“Nonessential?”

“Only cutting wiring to the frontal lobe. Anything more and you will definitely damage your brainstem.”

The implications were beginning to sink in, slowly, but surely. “So you’re saying I’m stuck with him? Even worse, that I can’t get paid a cool one point five from this mystery associate of yours?” Priss wasn’t sure what smarted more - having to share space with a mental freelancer for the rest of her days, or the lost money.

“We’ll have to work something out between you and my - client. Just come over here and make sure you aren’t followed. We may be looking at a larger job if that chip cannot be removed.”

“Fine. Let me get my stuff together.” She hung up, feeling like absolute shit. Johnny had moved to the couch, sitting on top of its backing, legs straight, heels on the ottoman.

“Ouch,” he smirked. “One point five million down the drain, huh? That’s too bad.”

“Fuck you, Silverhand. You gonna make this difficult for me?”  
“Depends on who this client of hers is. I don’t trust most megacorps, and only one of the big dudes could wave around fifteen million euro to get me back. That’s a lot even for a megacorp, actually.” He scratched his stubbly chin with his cyberarm. “Be cheaper just to double-cross your boss, kill her, kidnap you with the chip intact, then just have you do whatever they need you to do with me.”

“So you’re saying I should go armed.”

“Yep. I know what’s in that backup stuff bag, you know what’s in that bag, and I’m saying right now that you probably want to unzip it and assume the worst.”

“In front of a cop.” Leon winced visibly.

“Yep.”

“You do realize how batshit that is.”

“It’s either that, or go in there with a handcannon you’ve never even _used_. "

“I’m not going to walk into my boss’s house dressed to kill her!”

“Could be held hostage. Could be one of those big blue dudes that keep showing up in your head-”

“Boomers. They’re robots. Biomechs.” Okay, now Leon definitely looked confused. He mouthed, _he doesn’t know what Boomers are?_

“Whatever they are, could be that one of them has her at gunpoint, and they’ll blow your pretty little Stingray’s guts out if you don’t comply. Could be they _expect_ you to come knocking without some real firepower.”

“You’re serious.”

“Dead serious, rockergirl. C’mon, the cop’s good for it. If he wasn’t he’d have turned you in a long time ago, right?”

“Fine.” She turned to Leon. “What’d he say?” he asked.

“He wants me to bring some backup stuff to Sylia’s place. Some client wants the chip back, and he thinks they’re not gonna pay me if I give it to them unless I go in there expecting Boomers.”

Leon raised an eyebrow at that. “Want me to come with?”

“And lose your badge for getting in a hypothetical gunfight off-duty?”

He shrugged. “If it saves your life, it’d be worth it.”

Priss half-glared at him. “I’ll be fine. If Sylia’s actually being held hostage by some megacorp extraction team, and I honestly don’t think she is, I’m dead meat anyway. I’m just taking some backup stuff just to shut Johnny up.”

“I heard that,” the dead rockstar said, but he didn’t move at all. “All I’ve been doing at this point is just giving you advice. Short of acting like boosterware or something that’s all I _can_ do. Be nice if you just listened.”

“I am listening,” she said, then said to Leon, “He’s being a passive-aggressive dick about the whole thing. Just offering advice, blah blah blah.”

“Okay. I mean, no offense, but could you find some way to, I don’t know, telepathically communicate? Subvocalize? Because hearing one end of an argument like that gets pretty annoying.”

“Mm,” she grunted. “I’ll see what I can do. Let me get through my backup stuff first.”

She went over to the duffel bag, tapped the hard scanner pad with her thumb, pulled out a full bodysuit with armor plating on it, closed the now much smaller bag, and went back to the bathroom to get dressed.

And there Leon sat, rubbing the hardpad with his own thumb, knowing it wouldn’t unlock.

“Johnny Silverhand,” he said to himself. “God _damn_ that’s cool.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, my extended spring break will be over in a few hours, and then it's back to classes - on Zoom. Man, isn't Zoom just the little tech startup that could these days? I can only imagine their shareholder meetings: "Gentlemen, the simple fact is we have TOO MUCH MONEY." Or something like that.
> 
> Anyway, that aside, what's my schedule for writing gonna look like going forward? The truth is I don't know. Probably a lot more of this fic than Vigilante's Run, since I can, theoretically, put out shorter chapters for it. (Of course this chapter ended up being much longer than I thought it would but that's beside the point.) Maybe once every other week - hack the chapters out every Friday or so when I don't have classes and can sort of excuse myself from homework for a day? We'll see.
> 
> In the meantime - I dunno. I only have so many BGC fics I'm willing to recommend to the bored and curious, and there is no CP2020 fiction out there that isn't just 2077-styled yaoi, so if you want to learn more about the combined universe I'm trying to create here, coming from either end, I would recommend downloading the Cyberpunk 2020 Firestorm PDF's (Stormfront and Shockwave) on DriveThruRPG or The Trove. The way I'm planning the arc of this fic, they will be important to say the least. The Bubblegum Crisis RPG (published by the same people, around the same time) is out of print, obviously, so if you want to learn more about that you'll have to just use The Trove - there is no legitimate way to get that information.


	7. Chapter 5: Enemies at Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The people who tried to nab Spider the last time come back, and this time they're packing heat.

**Silky Doll Lingerie Boutique**

**5:34 pm**

**June 14th, 2036**

Michiko Kanazawa had a sneaking suspicion about her employer. Not that she’d say it to Sylia’s face, lest she risk losing her job and later her life, but it was so obvious. The biker chick who she’d see come in through the back? The pink-haired cop? The gal with the headband? They showed up around the building incredibly often, and while they’d bought a set or two from the shop, that didn’t explain why they  _ still _ kept coming around, and trying to inconspicuously slip through to places that were either marked EMPLOYEES ONLY or weren’t marked at all, the kind of place even she wasn’t allowed to go. 

_ Clearly _ Sylia was some sort of lesbian harem dominatrix, using her wealth and power to gather lovers, and those were her underlings. There was the leather-loving biker dyke, the sexually inexperienced cop who found herself liking it when people took her handcuffs, and the gal with the headband only  _ looked _ straight. She was the big hole in the theory, but she’d find a way to make her fit with her little fantasy, she was sure of it.

She sighed, snapping back to reality. It was a slow day, with customers floating around all the other clothing stores the LADYS633 had to offer, but no one coming into her little corner of the world. She had an hour or so before Sylia gave her a dinner break; she’d go to the Ucchan’s across the street, shove down a Mac n’ Cheese Okonomiyaki, then hunker down for the night shift. She was new, but classes were back in swing at Megatokyo U and this job, no matter how much ‘design experience’ Sylia had promised her, would have to go pretty soon. Just one more week, she’d get her paycheck, and have enough money to pay off her tution plus change, provided nothing went wrong.

It was, of course, as she glided over to the register where fellow shopgirl Naomi Tsukuyama was, fluffing the racks of provocative halters with a delicate hand, that something went horribly wrong.

Namely, a bunch of  _ men  _ walked in.

Now, Michiko had only had a few men come into Sylia’s establishment. Most of them were looking for something special for their girlfriend, the kind of dweebs who didn’t understand that feminine nightwear  _ had _ to be decided by the lady in question. Even if they’d seen their lady naked? Even if. Short of being a woman you wouldn’t understand, she’d say.

But these people were clearly not looking for lingerie. There were two women and four men, all wearing slightly lumpy suits that didn’t fit any of them particularly well, and dark sunglasses with red rims. Naomi noticed them first, apparently. Michiko looked at her, looked at the men and women silently moving to fill the shop’s space, then nodded.

There was a low warbling sound in her earpiece. That meant she’d activated the silent alarm.

The shopgirls weren’t allowed to do much, of course. The doors to would slam shut and lock, nonlethals would be put into passive mode, and Sylia would get a request to call the police on whatever she was looking at.

It was not, of course, enough.

Because the moment Naomi hit the silent alarm, the lead man, who had greying blond hair and a vaugely European look about him, drew a small pistol from his jacket and shot her.

Michiko screamed, long and loud, as her coworker’s head crumpled in on itself. She moved on instinct to dive for the maser Sylia kept under the counter. That was a mistake; the man tracked her and shot her in the head, too. She died instantly, as the hollow-point round mushroomed and fragmented, turning her frontal cortex into so much organic sludge.

The man lowered his gun, still smoking, and smiled. He motioned to the other thugs, for that was what they were, to move up. They did.

Two seconds later, the shutters dropped over the windows, plunging the shop into darkness.

The lead man clicked over to night vision automatically. He checked to see the others had done the same. They had, and so he motioned with his gun hand towards the unmarked elevator at the far end of the shop, their eyes shining in pairs.

* * *

**Sylia’s Penthouse**

**5:34** **pm**

Sylia was getting dinner ready, a pre-pack stir fry she’d found in the back of the fridge, when her phone buzzed. She checked the screen; gunshots in her shop, and the emergency defense systems had triggered.

Well, then. Michiko and Naomi were most likely dead. She tapped the confirmation to call in the other Sabers under a Code Keter just as the blast shutters dropped over the big windows in the living room. A second later, the lights clicked on.

“Um, Sylia?” Spider was getting up from where she had been catching up with Mackie. Sylia darted out from the kitchen, phone in hand. “Is something-”

“Gunshots in the Silky Doll. If I had to hazard a guess, your pursuers decided to come back.”

Spider shivered. “So you’re gonna lock them in and pump capsaicin into the vents, right?”

“Unfortunately, gas-based emergency defenses were recently rendered illegal under Megatokyo law.”

“But active-denial isn’t?” Spider said, taken aback.

“Something like that, yes.” Sylia rummaged in her desk, then pulled out a revolver, sleek and heavy. “Our legal system is not a rational institution, in case you haven’t noticed. Do you still have that handgun of yours?”

Spider nodded.

“Then, if you would be so kind, follow Mackie to more secure environs. Mackie, get Spider and yourself to the underground labs. Arm yourself at the first opportunity. We don’t know who these people are, or how many of them there are. This places us at a considerable disadvantage.”

“Okay,” Spider said, turning to Mackie, who had already scrambled to the hallway leading into the library. He made a little come-hither gesture, and Spider followed. “You don’t seriously plan to just take on a whole extraction squad by yourself, do you?” she said craning her neck to maintain eye contact with Sylia.

“We have an upstairs armory,” Sylia said. “If they find us all absent, they’ll move on the secure parts of my building that much quicker. A reasonable decoy is required to delay the team undoubtedly working their way up the elevator shaft as we speak, alongside the backup they have-” here she turned to her console and ran her fingers over the keyboard faster than Spider could track “-working the way up from our maintenance entrance via the stairs, with demolition gear in hand. Once my backup makes it here, I will retire to my personal panic room and remotely plan our defenses as necessary.”

“So you’re going to do what? Bat your eyelashes at them and hope they’re the monologuing types until the cops get here?”

“Miss Murphy-” Mackie, his voice distant, the sound of him tapping at something even more distant.

“Oh no, Spider, the police will take too long to get here. My backup is much more trustworthy, we’ll say.”

“The girl on the phone?”

“Miss Murphy, we need to move-”

“Yes, Spider, she’s armed well enough. Don’t worry.”

Spider nodded, clearly not believing it, but she ducked out of sight all the same. Sylia sighed, and turned to her console, flashing a fifteen minute police response time, and ran through the monitors. The backup team was working their way through a locked door with a welding torch, and the IR cameras in her shop showed a massive hole where her little elevator was supposed to be. She switched to her elevator shaft camera, and got a good look at the people trying to extract her guest and, presumably, kill her.

She got a few seconds before one of the men waved a laser sight in the camera’s general direction, frying it, but it was enough. Four men, two women, light armorjackets, no armaments bigger than a modular carbine strapped to the back of the largest man, nothing smaller than the snail-drum machine pistol on the side holster of one of the women. Climbing up the elevator shaft with no cords, which meant Van Der Waals gloves. If she had sprung for the electrified shaft walls, she could have dropped them all in an instant. IR didn’t suggest Boomers, but it definitely detected the kind of partial conversions that would have been very much in the style a decade ago: Both women had all four of their limbs cyberized, plus some sort of subdermal linear frame between their shoulder blades. The men only had their arms replaced, but she got enough IR interference from them that suggested total coverage subdermal armor. So the women closed the distance and the men soaked up damage; how sexist.

Right then. Sylia loaded her revolver, the fat .454 Casull rounds slipping into the six chambers.She pocketed two spare cylinders, loaded them, and slipped them into her belt. Then she took out a scope half the size of the gun itself, an IR-capable laser-sighter, and slid it onto the rail. She withdrew several minigrenades of her own design from a lower panel, fully charged, and pocketed them as well. Finally, her combat knife, the one Fargo had given her all those years ago. Hopefully it would be able to punch through subdermal armor. Otherwise she would be in deep trouble.

Then she turned to her elevator, a stylish double-door design that opened out onto a landing, got into the hallway, pressed her back up against the wall, and waited.

* * *

**5:41 pm**

Johannes Rausmann was a deniable asset in the finest tradition. Cyberware implanted to legal limits, carbine slung over his back, a hundred kilos of lean, mean German ready to murder the crap out of anything his employer pointed him at. Operations in Megatokyo were difficult, but tolerable enough once you got into the rhythm of things. Intel said this woman had no Boomers of any sort, which was an oddity, but it would work to their benefit. He and his comrades were the finest meatmen money could buy, but he was under no illusion that they could take on anything in the C-Series and win. So they were an anachronism, but they were an anachronism that their employer appreciated greatly.

They reached the top of the elevator shaft, where the target was supposed to keep her penthouse. So far, they had not encountered any resistance - Dietrich, their Netrunner, had kept most signal work jammed. He’d let one little thing go, some sort of quantum-encrypted signal wired to tech he’d said was a decade ahead of the avant-garde. But the point was the police wouldn’t come until dear Grigory had set his incendiary charges and let the place go up, and by that point it would be too late.

_ Svetlana, Natasha.  _ he rattled over the subvocal masti-mikes that were standard in their little group. He planted himself just below the elevator doors. A quick tap, and he knew it was armored.  _ Pull the doors open. _

_ Yes, sir _ . Spiderlike, more adept with their VDW implants than anyone else he’d seen, they scrambled to each side of the doors, and wedged their nails in between the millimeter-thin gap between the doors.

_ Go _ .

And they did. It took a few seconds of tortured screeching on the door’s parts, but then it widened to a finger-width, then a hand-width, then the doors began to bend and warp around, just enough for Johannes to peek inside.

This was his first mistake. A quick, reflex-boosted peek up, just to scan the room, maybe fire a few rounds in there to take out whatever was on the other side. He was fast. His Keresnikov boosterware had made him fast. He knew that. He wasn’t stupid.

He just wasn’t fast enough to dodge Sylia Stingray.

He heard the shot before he saw it, but by that time it was too late, the DPU round was rushing toward him faster than a jetliner, and he ducked, but it skinned the top of his skull all the same. Now, Johannes might have come back from that. It would have hurt like hell, but neuroprosthetics were within his employer’s capabilities, and he would have regrown his motor cortex in a few months.

Unfortunately, he had cermet insets around most of his skin, including around his skull. They stopped anything short of a 9mm slug, true, but they were the wrong choice for this op.

Because when DPU strikes metal or ceramic, it sparks at several thousand degrees centigrade, and renders the material it hits (and usually tears through) the same temperature.

Which meant that, in the course of about a half-second, Johannes Rausmann’s skull went from room temperature to bone-scorchingly hot.

He screamed. Like the devil himself was pumping air into his lungs, he screamed. His hands shot to his scorching hot face on instinct, trying to staunch the mind-ripping pain he felt, even if it meant tearing off his own face to do so. This was his second mistake; it screwed up his center of mass just enough to disengage his VDW boots.

He fell down the elevator shaft, screaming. Then, five seconds later, he stopped.

* * *

Well, Sylia thought, that went extremely well. One down, five to go, and they would tread much lighter now that one of their own had gone down before the operation had even started proper.

Still, though. She had no hope of using the elevator as a chokepoint. These people weren’t stupid. The next thing they’d stick through that elevator shaft was gunbarrels, and then bullets. They’d wrench it open, burst through, and presumably cover every angle in the room within a few seconds. It was times like this she wished she had smoke grenades.

The doors slid open, grinding and shrieking like tortured souls. The operatives moved in almost faster than she could track; first the women darted into the narrow space between the doors like contortionists, the only sign of their passing a slight rustling of their armorjackets, and then they swept the room as the three remaining men finished the job and barreled in.

She would only have an instant. Perhaps not even that, if her enemies could suppress her minigrenades. Right about… now.

She tossed two minigrenades, each smaller than her palm. They bounced right between the operatives. The women darted back first, the men moved second, and then they detonated.

Flashbang suppressors were common enough among cybernetically-enhanced operatives by the end of the 20’s. But what Sylia threw were not flashbangs in the conventional sense. She called them Pulsars, in her private files, because upon detonation they began strobing a wide spectrum of radiation for about eight seconds.

Enough radiation to shut down most cyberware and blind most conventional optics.

Sylia had to shut her eyes as the two grenades began to strobe at 240 FPS, but even with her eyes shut she could make out the dim outlines of the women darting back on legs that gave out seconds later, the men staggering back before recovering. Instincts kicking in, her father’s gifts burning holes in her meat brain, she peeked around the corner, opened her eyes, and fired again.

She missed her first shot but hit her second, the round blowing a nicely-sized hole in one of the women as they moved to recover and track her. She jerked back and forth, like an insect flipped on its backside, for a few more seconds, then stopped moving. Sylia didn’t wait to see if she could squeeze off any more shots; she darted into her doorway to her bedroom just as bullets from the men, who had recovered quicker, filled the hallway where she had been taking cover.

She had an emergency armory in the ‘empty space’ between her room and Mackie’s; that was where she’d go now, moving between rooms before her pursuit caught on. She yanked open her closet door, waved her hand in front of the cardiac-pulse scanner, and the secret door slid open just as a frag grenade was tossed in behind her.

The door shut as quickly as it opened, but that still wasn’t fast enough. A piece of frag, then two, skimmed the side of her left arm and leg. She gasped as pain bloomed across her body, then bit down on her tongue to shut herself up.

Sylia backpedaled into the armory, barely appreciating the tremendously illegal firepower racked on its shelves. She fell, got up, trailing blood. Some part of her mind, something her father had put in her, noted she hadn’t actually split open any particularly important arteries and she could recover quickly. She clung to that realization, let it eat away at the shock, until she could move again. Then, she scrambled for one of the medkits she had under the guns, popped it open, knowing full well she only had seconds to wrap skinpatches over her wounds. She did so, then grabbed an FN-FAL bullpup from one of the racks and loaded it just as something began banging on the door she’d come through.

Well. Evidently the blood trail had given her away. She hefted the assault rifle, contemplated firing through the armored door - maybe she could just discourage them - thought better of it, steeled herself, then slung the FAL over her shoulder and opened the door to Mackie’s bedroom.

One of the men was there, a squat looking guy, tan with dark curly hair. She stepped back as he fired into the opening door. Sylia stayed silent for a few seconds, let him rush the doorway, then stepped into it and fired her revolver point-blank into his guts.

He dropped fast, too close to dodge, blood spurting from the exit wound, and she jumped back to let him fall to the ground. She heard commotion, coming from her room, and dashed into Mackie’s just as the clattering of a machine pistol filled the rooms.

She winced, took in the room, tried to ignore the pain in her left arm. She hefted the FAL back in the direction of the machine pistol shots, aimed down the sights, knew full well she was surrounded. If she left Mackie’s bedroom, she could either go left or right. They probably had one man guarding each end, and one man rushing into the armory. She wasn’t sure who to shoot first. She still had three minigrenades, though, but there was a good chance the enemy’s recovery times would be even shorter than last time. She’d have to use them sparingly, then retreat to the library, assuming the other team hadn’t arrived by now, in which case she was a dead woman no matter how fast she got there.

Well. She had a few of Father’s tricks left to use. Horrible, evil tricks, the kind that left the imprint of someone  _ else  _ inside her head. But tricks nonetheless.

A plan formed in her mind, every action she needed to take over the next ten seconds or so congealing into existence. She didn’t like any part of it, but as a cohesive whole it was workable. If it failed she probably wouldn’t be alive long enough to appreciate its failure.

So.

She peaked around the edge of Mackie’s closet, saw one man and one woman backing him up, and tossed two minigrenades to compensate.

Then, she dashed across their firing window, keeping low, darting out into the hallway, tossing a minigrenade to her right seconds before she surged her own reflex boosters, dove onto the carpet, and held down the FAL’s trigger for a good two seconds. The rifle boomed in the confined space, every round spent washing over her eardrums like a tidal wave of pure noise. The man in front of her was promptly ripped to shreds.

She rolled over to be ready for whatever came to her left, but she wasn’t fast enough bringing the rifle around, as one of the women charged her, grabbed her wounded arm, and hauled her up, then slammed her into the opposite wall.

Her vision spun, even as that same part of her mind noticed that she had a machine pistol jammed under her chin, even as her ears cleared to barely hear the woman screaming at her in atrocious Japanese.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to hack out. She wasn’t even really sure what she was sorry for - the fact that she couldn’t hear whatever request the woman was making, or that she was going to die here, or that she was going to disappoint Father, Spider, Mackie, Priss-

Wait, Priss? Suddenly her hearing felt much clearer, just in time for the woman, at least a head shorter than her, to scream in her ear, “Where is Spider Murphy, Bitch!”

She considered telling the truth, then decided against it, somehow lucid enough to make the decision. “Not here,” she said. “Cops got her.”

“Liar! You say where Spider Murphy is or I break your fingers!” Good lord was her Japanese bad. But, yes, she had a vicegrip on her left hand, the FAL long since dropped, and she probably could break them very effortlessly. It was strange, how clearly she was thinking, despite the fact that, she noticed, she was covered in blood, most of it from the man she had just torn to shreds, some of it probably her own. Probably more than she wanted to admit.

“Look, I’m willing to cooperate provided-”

_ “GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH!” _

Wait, what? Sylia tried to turn her head in the direction of the sound, as did the head of the woman holding her hostage, which was when the machine pistol pressing into her chin went limp as the head of the woman holding it jerked back at an unnatural angle. Then, her whole body dropped to the floor as something large went through her left eye and popped out the other side of her head, a chunk of her blonde hair gone sticky with red and pink.

Sylia was torn between shock and the sense that she needed to get moving. It kept her immobile for about a second, before she recovered her senses, dived for the machine pistol, then brought it up just as the last man barged through the doorway to her bedroom. The gun stuttered and kicked in her loose hands, but it was enough to run a zigzag of entrance wounds up his chest, before he promptly collapsed on top of her.

And then she felt someone touch her, grab her, drag her out, and she looked up, her eyes blurry, into the red eyes of Priss Asagiri.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Oceans rose, civilizations fell, eons passed. Then Priss said, nonchalantly, “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Sylia said. “Was the shouting really necessary?”

“Always wanted to say that line ever since I saw  _ Aliens _ ,” she laughed. “Seriously. You good?”

She looked down. The last man she had just killed was in front of her, burbling his just-ended life away. Her relatively classy business ensemble was soaked with blood, slightly lukewarm. Every hair on her body was standing on end.

“Honestly?”

“Yes, honestly.”

“No.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, looks like I have some explaining to do, don't I? I promised fast updates, and I didn't deliver.
> 
> I've actually had this chapter plus some other stuff sitting on my google docs for a month or two. I got it edited, fixed the chapter up according to those proposed edits, then... I left it sitting there. I didn't work on Vigilante's Run in its place or anything, I just haven't worked on anything that could be called proper BGC fanfiction for a good month or so.
> 
> Why? Well, like I said in Truck-Kun's Big Adventure, I've been working on a BGC RPG set in a sort of rebooted universe based off of 2032 (and ignoring almost everything 2040), a hack of all of RTal's old work that, only half-way done, threatens to be over 200 pages (and 50K words). My plan, such as it is, is to finish up some last-minute changes, then post a link to the doc on r/rpgs with permission for folks to comment on it. From there, I'll fill it in with fluff, character sheets, roleplaying tips, maybe even make some lore-oriented expansions where I can just indulge my worldbuilding impulses... But I'm getting ahead of myself.
> 
> Oh, yeah, and I've had remote-learning for my spring quarter of college. That's always a timesink. It's exams week next week. Won't that be fun.
> 
> I don't know what to tell the handful of people who have been eagerly awaiting more stuff from me, assuming such people exist. It's not like I've given up on fanfic entirely - this RPG thingy is just another expression of that same creative impulse and a desire to make BGC-related stuff. But I don't see myself making much new Song of Silverhand content anytime soon, and it's even less likely I'll have new Vigilante's Run-related stuff put out. Fuck if I know why my creative fount dried up on those ends. I don't have any good excuses there, only apologies.
> 
> In the meantime, if you need a good BGC fix, why not try out Forward Momentum's 'radio' plays in a soft reboot of the setting? I haven't listened to them yet, but they strike me as just a really cool concept. If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go tamper with my endocrine system through a judicious application of hot chocolate and try not to think about the internet for awhile.


End file.
